


Reset

by Magtele (Mjolnir)



Series: Rememberance [1]
Category: X-Men (Comicverse), X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-01
Updated: 2012-07-30
Packaged: 2017-11-10 09:12:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 34,612
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/464632
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mjolnir/pseuds/Magtele
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lovely art by seealpsee. Fic Prompt 1030 for the X-Men Reverse Bang</p><p>Erik spent his entire life trying to gain revenge on Schmidt. With anterograde amnesia, all he can do is leave himself notes and photos to find out what to do next. When he meets Charles Xavier, all of that changes. Together they must fight against Sebastian Shaw and his second in command, Emma Frost. Essentially, XMFC with a Memento twist.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you seealpsee for putting up with this late entry!

 

**  
**

He woke up in an airplane about an hour ago and has no idea how he got here. The plane looks like its landing soon and he doesn't even know where he's coming from. He's waiting for the stewardess to announce it on landing. He looks around him briefly. Looks like they've been flying for a while, most of the other passengers are sleeping. Nobody sitting next to him. He reaches into his suit jacket pocket. Nothing. No clues as to why he's on this plane. He shifts slightly upward, searching his pockets. A couple of receipts, and a brown leather wallet.

****

****

He flips it open, to reveal a couple of francs, several hundred American dollars and a luggage tag, presumably for this flight. Theres something hard in the back of the wallet, and he flips it over to reveal a pocket in the back. He lifts what looks like a small piece of sheet metal out. There are words embedded on the steel in his handwriting. 

****

****

 

_Klaus Schmidt_

_**  
**_

The name alone triggers a sick feeling in Erik's stomach. An all too easily remembered feeling of helplessness followed by a burning feeling of rage. The remembered sound of his mothers last cries echo in his memory where nothing else resides. This he remembers. Everything else is transient. It should bother him more that he can't remember anything in his life after Schmidt murdered his family and stole his future, but as long as he can remember this, this name and his purpose, then he has peace. He glances down at the next imprinted words on the metal.

 

_Shave right thigh._

****

****

 

Well that makes a whole lot of sense. Shave right thigh? He palms his legs through his suit pants. An odd order. Once he's reached his destination in...wherever it is, he'll have to figure out what that particular one meant. The third line was easier to understand.

  


****

****

_Las Vegas_

_  
_

****

****

A destination? Or where he's come from? The francs in his wallet say he's been in Switzerland or France. Erik suddenly wishes that he'd been a bit more specific and less cryptic. 

****

****

“Flight 4401 from Geneva to Las Vegas will be landing in 10 minutes, please fasten your seatbelts,” a blond stewardess announces while walking the aisles. She catches his eye and smiles shyly. He winks at her, faking a smile, then waits until after the plane has landed to approach her.

 

“You look like someone who knows her way around this city, could you recommend a good hotel?” Barely accented English. He doesn’t even remember learning it. 

**  
** **“** Sure” the stewardess says with a flirty smile on her face, “Galaxy Motel is down the road from the airport, they’ll give you a good deal if you’re on a budget.” **  
  
** He remembers the slim amount of bills in his pocket.. “Right. Perfect.” **  
  
** As he exits the plane, he retrieves his luggage and flags down the first taxi he sees outside the airport. **  
  
** **“** Galaxy Hotel, please.” **  
  
** He spends the ride vainly trying to remember if he’s been to this city before.

 

****

**  
** At first glance, the motel is indeed a “bargain”, the planet symbol on the sign was nearly faded away. He could feel the rust spots corroding the metal. As he pushes in the front door he sees a young blond kid at the front desk reading a magazine.  ****

**** **“** A room, please.” Erik asks, leaning against the counter. ****

**** The kid looks up from his magazine with an annoyed expression. “How many nights?” ****

**** **“** Let’s just leave my bill open. Can it just be charged per diem?” ****

**** **“** Your dime,” the kid says, taking his ID. “You’re in 402, here’s your key. Any problems just ring the front desk.’ the kid recites uninterestedly, his focus already back on his magazine.  ****

**** Erik hesitates, then comes to a decision, shrugging. “So this might sound a little strange, but you should know that I have a disease-” ****

**** **“** Shit man are you fucking contagious or something?” the kid rears back quickly, trying to get as much space between him and Erik as possible. ****

**** **“** No,” Erik says curtly, “Just a memory problem.” ****

**** **“** What, amnesia?” The kid is still slightly spooked, inching further away from the counter. ****

**** **“** Not quite. I’m not able to create any more new memories. So, in the morning, If I ask you any of the same questions, please excuse me.” ****

**** **“** No short term memory. So you forget everything pretty much as soon as its said? Do you remember the beginning of this conversation?” ****

**** Gritting his teeth slightly, Erik considers telling the kid that he remembers how much he hates to initiate conversations with people who ask too many goddamn questions, but he refrains, taking a deep breath. “No, its a bit longer than that. Just...let me know the little things, like which room I’m in, how long I’ve been here. Its a lot easier if someone at the front desk knows.” ****

**** **“** I”ll do you a solid and write it on your key, hows that?” the kid reaches for the key and Erik leans back, holding it out of reach. “No that's alright, I’ll write it down for myself, thanks.” He can’t trust any other handwriting. ****

**** **“** Suit yourself,” the kid lowers his outstretched arm, eyeing Erik suspiciously now. “You’re not shitting me are you, about this memory thing?” ****

**** **“** I wish I was.”  ****

**** **“** ...Right. Your room is on the 4th floor to the right of the stairs. And don’t “forget” to pay your bill when you check out.” ****

**** Erik ignores the last statement, heading towards the back stairs.  ****

**** The motel room is run down but not completely disgusting. A threadbare couch sits in the corner of the room, surrounded by a halo of water damage and scuffs on the walls. The bed is covered with a paisley bed cover that looks like it had seen several decades, and the small bathroom had no door, only a curtain that drew across the frame. Good enough for his purposes. Whatever they were. ****

**** _Shave right thigh._ ****

**** He drops his suitcase on the bed, using his powers to undo the lock and latch without bothering to figure out the combination. Inside lies a razor, shaving cream, several polaroids with his handwriting on the back, a Polaroid camera, and a pistol with ammunition. He rinses off the razor, strips down to his boxers. On his way back to the bed he catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror. His face looks older than he expected. His sandy blond hair is growing a bit shaggy, and stubble was starting to grow in. His eyes were drawn down to the words on his chest. “I murdered your family.” On his right pectoral, an image of Klaus Schmidt as he  recalled him last. As he raised his hand to touch the tattoo, the hated numbers on his inner arm caught his attention. This he could never forget. Further up on his arms names were written and crossed out on his forearms, locations decorated his lower abdomen. Some of the tattoos were old and settled, others were red and newly healing.  ****

**** So this was his journal. ****

**** He quickly lathers up the razor and swiped it across his right thigh, although it barely had any hair on it to begin with. ****

**** _Ahlquist_ _**,** _ _6’1, Switzerland_ ****

**** Someone he knew? Enemy? Emptying his suitcase out on the bed, he notices several passports tucked away inside an inner pocket. The polaroids, he places on the bed first up, and the first one grabs his attention. It was a closeup of a man with cropped silver blond hair. His face had been beaten so severely that it was almost grotesque, and he was clearly dead. Blood pooled on what was visible of the floor on the photograph. Erik flips the photo over. ‘ Ahlquist’, written on the back. Well that solves that then. The question is, did he get anything useful out of Ahlquist. Underneath the man’s name was scribbled in smaller letters, “Las Vegas, US, Hellfire” ****

**** Hellfire.  ****

**** Well clearly not literal. A place? A codeword? He sets that particular photo aside and takes a look at some of the others. The next one is a beautiful blond woman, decked in white and furs. Her cold blue eyes seemed to burn him through the photograph, and it looks like the other person in the photograph was cut off, she’s holding on to some unseen person’s arm. He flips it over. Nothing written. ****

**** The other photos were of similarly dead men as the first, with names that corresponded to points that were already crossed off on his body. Seems like he had been busy.  ****

**** He starts to pin the photos on the wall with little metal slivers that he takes from the bed frame. ****

**** Hellfire.  ****

**** He picks up the phone and rings the front desk. **  
**

********

**  
** _There are things he does remember. He remembers the first time he ever used his gift intentionally. By then his mother was long dead, his family was long consigned to the fires, and yet he felt such a rush, such a glorious rush of triumph. A bittersweet rush as it was several weeks too late to save anyone, but by that time he was smart enough to know that they would not have survived anyway. Nobody survives._ ****

**** _He took his pats on the head calmly, it wouldn’t do to have the Doctor recognize any defiance on his face. The Doctor searches it out daily, teases it out with little comments, numerous experiments. He don’t like to give the Doctor the satisfaction, but he gets all of it in the end anyway. The coin long since abandoned, he was tasked with switching the positions of little metal balls on the counter in front of him. The Doctor so generously gave him three attempts at moving them, after which he would execute yet another prisoner. By now he had already seen the tear filled eyes of his mother cloud over, what was one more person that he didn’t know? And yet their fear filled breaths were still a motivation. No more people would die because of his failures, he promised himself. A foolish promise. Of course more people would die because of him. The Doctor would ensure it._ ****

**** _It was an effort each time he used his powers. He remembered the first time, the wave that had felt overwhelming, leaving you stunned and barely cognizant of what had happened. This was more like trying to hold back a rushing river using only his hands, only letting a small stream through. The metal balls switched positions slowly, jerkily._ ****

**** _The Doctor_ _congratulates him, ecstatic. He only has eyes for the next girl on the line, waiting for her death in case of your failure. Unlike the others, her eyes are wide and completely fearless. She is awed by him._ ****

**** _It feels good._

 

_  
_

  



	2. Chapter 2

Erik wakes up to the sound of a taxi horn blaring. The driver is looking back at him with an impatient expression on his face, clearly waiting for him to get out and pay. His hand is curled around a paper note. Opening it, he sees  _ 'Hellfire, Las Vegas, US, possibly owned by Schmidt' _ written in his handwriting. It was wrapped around what looked like an invitation. The taxi driver honks the horn angrily.

 

"Are you deaf? I said, this is where you wanted me to drop you off right?"

"I'm sorry...yes."

 

He pays the man and gets out the taxi, stepping almost immediately into a crowd of well dressed men. He tries to walk around the perimeter, hoping to get better surveillance on the place, but it looks like he’s not the only one. There are already a small crowd of men around the entrance of the club waiting to get in. Erik picks a corner to stand where he would look the least suspicious, eyeing each man as they pass by into the club. He couldn’t tell if he knew any of them or if any of them were connected to Schmidt. They just looked like rich tourists who were already drunk. Figures it would be too easy to find him on the street, Erik thinks to himself. **  
  
**He catches a glance of himself in the mirrored surface of one of the walls of the club and slicks back a flyaway hair. His blue suit didn’t look expensive, but it was sharp enough for him to pass for an ambitious businessman hoping to wind down and relax. He hands his invitation to the bouncer at the front of the door and heads into the main room.

 

The room was done up in shades of red and purple, with gauzy curtains hanging from the wall. The floor was light up in a path straight to the center stage where a caramel skinned girl was swaying seductively in white lingerie. Judging by the sheer amount of men with their eyes glued to that portion of the stage despite the other girls on there, Erik guessed that she was one of the main draws of this place. He snags the arm of a passing brunette decked out in black underthings, idly noting that while her body was quite impressive, her underwear was a bit pedestrian compared to some of the other girls he’d seen on the floor.  **  
  
** **“** A scotch please.” **  
  
** He's a bit surprised when she turned to him with a look of annoyance before a bland and obviously fake smile appears on her face. “Coming right up sir, I’ll just notify one of the waitresses,” quick as an eel, she escapes through the crowd. **  
  
** Huh. Maybe she was new. Most of the seats in the back of the club are empty, so he makes his way to the back couches and takes a seat, contemplating what moves he could take next. Speak with one of the dancers? It was unlikely that they would know any useful information. Pretend to be a businessman wanting to meet the owners? There was too much of a chance that someone would remember him later, and with his condition that would expose him as a fraud too easily. Stealth it was then.  **  
  
** Rising from the couch, Erik picks up a glass of alcohol from a passing waitresses tray and watches as she makes her way to the back of the bar where a slightly hidden door is behind one of the many gauzy curtains that decorate the walls. He knocks back the drink, making sure to spill some of it on his clothing and intentionally stumbles a bit on the carpet. He follows the path the waitress took, and tumbles through the doors in case someone was waiting behind them. The corridor ahead is empty, so he straightens and passes by several dressing rooms on his way to the unmarked door in the back. He can sense a lot of metal in the room...filing cabinets. **  
  
** Using a bit of his power to turn the deadbolt, he slips into the room and feels a small sense of triumph when he sees it is indeed an office. Erik quickly makes his way to the desk and rifles through the papers so conveniently left on top. Various bills and agreements that were all addressed to a name S. Shaw, and the return address was somewhere in New York. On the walls there are pictures of various pinups but one frame in particular catches Erik’s eye. Its of some unfamiliar men shaking hands but there is a man in the background whose stance sends a chill down his spine. He knows that man. He’s seen him every night in his dreams since he escaped. He pushes around the desk, getting closer to see the details of the photo. The man in background was definitely Schmidt. He grins fiercely. What he has been searching for, finally, FINALLY a connection that was more than a nebulous note. The men in front are shaking hands in front of a boat that reads 'Caspartina'. He slides the photo out of the frame and slides it into his pocket. After some hesitation, he picks up the document that had the New York address on it and spreads that out on the table. Taking one of the one of the pens from the desk, he writes down Schmidt on the paper in red ink, underlining the word three times viciously. **  
  
** **“** You know this area is off limits right?” A voice sounds from behind him in the doorway. **  
  
** Erik whirls around, the knife that was in his jacket sleeve snapping to his hand but he keeps it down by his side. It’s too late to play drunk and he doesn’t know how long she’s been standing there. The same dark skinned dancer who was on stage when he came in is leaning against the door, staring at him with narrowed eyes. Erik relaxes slightly once he determines that she’s unarmed, but still keeps his guard up. He knows he could probably silence her before she calls for help but he had planned to return to this place, now that he knows it’s connected to Schmidt. And...in this light she looks very young. She's wearing a rather homely robe over what looked to be the same lingerie getup she had on when she was on stage.  **  
  
** **“** You can’t talk?" Her eyes are hard and she looks utterly unconcerned at her unarmed state. Likely used to handling men larger than him. **  
  
** **“** I didn’t notice,” Erik says, giving her a false smile. “I’ll just be going back then.” **  
  
** **“** You didn’t notice the giant Employees Only sign on the door then? What did you just put in your pocket? Who are you?”  **  
  
** Erik stares her down, letting some of the violence he has planned show in his eyes. “I might be a bit drunk.” he states perfectly clearly. **  
  
** The girl swallows hard before she squares her shoulders and faces him off, putting steel in her own voice. “I won’t ask you again.” **  
  
** Enough of this. He uses his power to snake tendrils of metal out from the filing cabinets and drives them towards her arms and legs, noting with surprise that she almost dodges most of them before one snakes around her ankle, tripping her up. Something white flutters to the ground out of her robe pocket as she falls to the ground. He uses the wire wastebasket to curl around her neck once it looks like she was going to  _ spit _ at him, and crouches next to her, but not too close.  **  
  
** **“** Any words that come out of your mouth other than answers to my questions and they will be your last,” he states calmly. This trip has been cocked up enough by his own incompetence, and he doesn’t want to kill the girl but he will not hesitate if she does not cooperate. **  
  
** Her eyes flash angrily but she nods once, carefully.  **  
  
** **“** Who is the owner of this establishment?” He delicately lays one of the knives he had pushed up his sleeve to her throat and loosens the metal wire so that she can speak.  **  
  
** **“** I don't know...we all answer to Emma Frost.”

 

Frost. The name sounded vaguely familiar, but Erik couldn't say from where. **  
  
“** And what about this S **.** Shaw?” **  
  
**“I'm not sure. He might be the real owner? Like I said, we all answer to Frost here.” The girl is magnificent, for a human. Even in this helpless position she’s in, her, tone is angry enough to cut glass. She seems utterly unafraid of the fact that he’s just done what should be impossible. Erik thinks that it would be a shame to have to slit her throat. **  
  
**He stands and pulls the handkerchief from his pocket, anchoring the metal bands around her limbs to the floor and tying the cloth around her mouth as a gag.

 

Pausing, he looks down to see the small piece of paper that had fluttered to the floor when she had fallen to the ground. Picking it up, he sees its a small embossed card with a crest on the top. Underneath was the name Charles F. Xavier, and an address and phone number. The address was the same one as on the document he had found addressed to S. Shaw. Interesting. He flips the card over, and in what was clearly a girl's loopy handwriting was written ' _ If you need help.' _ **  
  
** **“** Someone will find you eventually. It would be best for both of us if you weren’t too detailed.” he smiles coldly at her before getting up and leaving the room, ignoring her muffled outraged noises. He knows that she will have no way to adequately explain what happened tonight. The humans never believe what’s right in front of them. **  
  
** And now he has a trail.

 

 

 

 

 

****

  
**** **  
** _ It’s not even like he hasn't seen this before. There was one other, if he recalls correctly. He had little else to do, standing at the entrance of the doors, ignored by the guards and feeling like a traitor in his uniform.  _ **  
  
** **“** _ How can you be a traitor to the humans, little Erik? You aren’t even human. Those aren’t your people” The Doctor's voice cuts through his memory.  _ **  
  
** _ He _ _ watches the man as he walks past the guards who are just waiting for him. He’s walking the same path that he’s walked every day since he arrived, but for him its a completely new path. He’s long forgotten his family, his past, and his horrified confusion implies that he’s even forgotten why he’s here. The guards wait for him every day waiting to torment him. It’s a game to them, that he comes back for the same punishment every day without even knowing that he’s doing it.  _ **  
  
** _ He _ _ would feel pity but you think the capacity has been burned out of him long ago. Sometimes he thinks that if he could forget the doctor forever then it might be worth giving up some of himself. He's given up so much already anyway. _ **  
  
** _ He was  _ _ relieved when the man’s body turned up with the dead several weeks later, and then felt sick over his reaction for months afterwards. _

 


	3. Chapter 3

********Erik crouches in an empty parking lot behind a black sedan. It’s nighttime and his leg is aching from what he assumes is the length of time he’s spent kneeling behind this car. A little thrown off balance by the fact that he’s randomly in a parking lot, he tries his best to remember anything that might have happened before this moment. Of course, nothing comes to mind. A breeze blows past him, causes him to pull his jacket around him a bit tighter. Cold, but it doesn’t feel like winter. There’s no other indication around that would show his location.  He wonders where he is and peeks out to the side of the car. The parking lot seems to be empty. **  
  
**Right then. He quickly uses his powers to open the car door and gets into the car. He just needs a moment to think, to figure out what the heck he’s doing before some good citizen passes by and tells the cops about a crazy man crouching in some random parking lot. **  
  
**Patting down his pockets, he pulls out a thin engraved sheaf of metal along with several polaroids and a sheet of paper. He scans the metal quickly and notes that at the very top, the word New York have been impressed more recently than the others. His likely location then. **  
  
**The paper seems to be a bill of some kind but he notices the word SCHMIDT written on the front of it, underlined three times. He freezes, mouth curving into an excited smile. Was he that close?  The bill is addressed to a Hellfire club in Las Vegas, but the address is already crossed out and initialed in his handwriting, so he assumes that he’s only to pay attention to the return address. Which is in New York. Which would match with the weather quite nicely, even though he’s in a part of town that Erik doesn’t recognize. There's a card attached to the bill, one for a professor by the name Charles F. Xavier. Looks like the addresses match. **  
  
**He flips down the visor and keys fall out into his hand. Amateurs. Putting them into the ignition, he pulls out of parking lot, only to slam on his breaks as a brunette throws herself in front of the car, slamming her hand on the hood. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” she yells, eyes flashing. **  
  
**Taken aback, Erik is too startled to do much but stare, and then consider running her over. He thinks that she can perhaps see that possibility in his face because she quickly runs around to the side of the car and pulls the door open-stupid, should’ve locked it-and shoves a badge in Erik’s face. **  
  
** **“** You stole the wrong person's car you ass--” she breaks off once she gets a good look at his face. “I’ve seen you before.” **  
  
**Erik groans internally. He had to be the one to steal what was probably the only cop’s car probably within dozens of miles. **  
  
** **“** I highly doubt that,” he says, even though he has no clue if she has seen him before or not. “Would it be too late for me to claim it was an honest mistake?”

 

Erik put on his best smile, holding his hands up in what most humans considered to be a classic surrender position but for him was actually the best position for him to deflect any bullets that might come out of that gun he could sense she had her hand pressed against in her jacket holster. **  
  
****“** Were you sent here?” she demands, hand still insistently pressed against her gun. **  
  
** **“** Sent here by whom? I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Erik says, starting to lose his patience. **  
  
**She eyes him suspiciously. “So you’re just an idiot car thief then.” **  
  
**Erik sighs. “Look, you...clearly need to be on your way and I...the door was open, and I had the keys in my hand, so I must've mistaken it for my car” he blatantly lies, but he can sense the key’s in the glove compartment.  “So how about I just get out and go on my way and I’ll let you go on yours.” **  
  
** **“** Are you fucking kidding me? You had the keys in your hand after you STOLE them. Do you see any other car in this parking lot? And where were in such a hurry to go, the local chop shop?” she asks incredulously, hand not wavering one bit. **  
  
**Erik hesitates, then decides to inject some truth into his story. He found it best not to lie too much in these situations, only because it was impossible to keep track of them for any longer than a day in any case. And plus it was easy to feign ignorance, since he was just as much in the dark as anybody else at this point. He just hoped that she wouldn’t remember where she had supposedly seen him before. He tells her about his condition, explaining that he had just come to in the parking lot, and was was trying to find the address on the card that he had in his pocket for more explanation as to where he was coming from. He found it easy to be deliberately vague considering the holes in his own memory. He pulls the card out of his pocket carefully and hands it over to her. **  
  
**He notices that her face changes slightly as she looks at the card. She recognizes it. **  
  
**"Interesting," was the only thing she said in reference to that. "You expect me to believe this story." **  
  
**"It's the only story I have, and happens to be a true one." Erik responds, not having to fake his look of frustration. **  
  
**"Oddly enough, it isn't even the most unbelievable story that I've heard this week, especially concerning him." she sighs. "Get out of my car." **  
  
**"You know where this this place is." Erik starts cautiously while climbing out of the front , wondering if he was pushing his luck. **  
  
**She slides in, bucking her seat belt and not looking at him. "I may, however at the moment I'm wondering if It would be a good idea to help a man who initially wanted to steal my car, so." **  
  
**Erik grits his teeth. "Please. I mean no harm." **  
  
**Which he didn't. Unless of course Schmidt was there, or someone who denied him access to the man in any way. **  
  
**He backs away from the car slowly, hands still up. "I'm sorry, I'll just...find it myself. Sorry for the trouble." **  
  
**She stares at him, tilting her head. "Well...I may be able to help. Perhaps. Besides, he'll be able to tell your intentions anyway and I'd love to be there when that happens. Get in the passenger side." **  
  
**Erik assumes she's talking about Charles Xavier, and he smiles inwardly. If "Charles' is an alias of Schmidt's then she would get quite a different meeting than she had likely been oping for. He jogs around the car and gets into the passenger seat, reaching over to shake her hand when she offers it. **  
  
**"Moira MacTaggart." **  
  
**"Magnus Eisenhardt." he lied smoothly. **  
  
**"Magnus," she repeats, her voice skeptical. **  
  
**"So? My parents were eccentric." Erik huffs defensively, slamming the car door shut. **  
  
**"That name is almost too ridiculous to be fake." she laughs, pulling out of the parking lot one handed. **  
  
**She still didn't take her arm off the weapon hidden in her jacket.

 

She drives them to a bar in what looked like a student section of town before she speaks up again. "Tonight is your lucky night. I was actually going to meet with him. You will wait here for me in the car while I speak with him first, because I'm here for a reason that frankly, has nothing to do with you, and is none of your business. You will stay here. in. this. car. Am I understood?" Her smile is all charm with steel underneath. With that, she was out of the car, taking the car keys with her and locking the door.

 

Wait in the car, right. Erik sits in the car for about five minutes after she leaves and then slips out and heads into the same bar he saw her go into. Luckily its rather crowded, so his entrance is well hidden by the throngs of grad students milling about. He spots her at a back table, sitting with a young man. He pushes his way past, trying to stay out of their line of sight, and manages to find a seat in a booth in the back where he can hear them reasonably well, but can only view them out of the corner of his eye. He only hopes that she doesn't turn her head too far and see him.  **  
  
** "-wanted to see him first to see what his deal was. I did not get the impression that he was connected but do you think he might be one of yours?" she was saying. **  
  
** "Hmm, The name Magnus Eisenhardt is not particularly familiar to me. It does seem strange that he would search for me at that particular address and not the compound if he was 'one of mine.'” **  
  
** "I don't know. I can’t guarantee that he is not connected to Shaw in any way it just seemed like a strange coincidence that someone would come looking for you here, and I swear I saw him at the Hellfire Club in Vegas. I left him in the car, but do you think you can do your.." Erik assumed she was gesturing to the other man as she trailed off uncertainly.  **  
  
** 'I don't think that will be particularly necessary Moira, I believe our guest has come to us." **  
  
** Erik stiffened in his seat and tried to turn away but he could feel the burn of Moira's glare against the back of his neck. **  
  
** "Hello, Erik." **  
  
** Erik whipped his head around at the sound of his name, to meet the bluest eyes he'd ever seen. **  
  
** "I believe you were looking for me. My name is Charles Xavier." **  
**

**  
**

****

 

 **** _He never really suspected that there might be more like him out there. There certainly wasn't anyone in the camps that had anything similar to what he had, the Doctor would have gathered them up as well. But after his escape he realized that while there might have not been anyone like him, people with other talents might exist. He came close to finding him once, not too long after the camps were disbanded and most of the higher officers had gone to ground like rats. It was several years later after the failed relationship with Magda that just proved to him the tenacity of humans to murder and destroy anything that might be superior to them. There was too much on the outside that reminded him of the camps, so he decided to destroy what he considered to be the source. For some reason, after making that decision all he remembers is snow, a pair of very cold blue eyes and pain. He's tried to recall detail, he's tried to meditate, he's tried every single human psychiatrist and doctor, and every attempt was a failure. After a while he stopped trying. It didn't really matter that he couldn't really have a life after this, considering the fact that he didn't think he would survive the attempt at revenge. _ **  
  
**

****

**  
  
** Moira is outraged at his perceived betrayal, her features pink with anger, but Erik doesn't care, all he has eyes for is this man, who is definitely not Schmidt. **  
  
** "Do I know you?" he demands, completely ignoring Moira's growing anger. **  
  
** "This is the first time we've met, I think I would have remembered." Charles smiles at him, leaning forward onto the table. He looked almost like a young man playing dress up in his father's clothes, with his tweed blazer and wavy brown hair that fell into his rather unnerving eyes. He looks at Erik as if he is looking straight into him, and Erik finds that he can't quite look away. He had seen eyes like that before somewhere, but he couldn't quite remember where.  **  
  
** Despite this man looking almost suspiciously innocent, he was still connected to Schmidt in some way and Erik intends to find out exactly how. He pulls out the paper that he found at Hellfire and smooths it onto the table. **  
  
** "And I presume you do business at this address?" Erik says, watching Charles' reactions carefully. **  
  
** "This is the address to one of my properties, yes." Charles brow furrows as he scans the bill quickly, "but I'm not sure why its addressed there, I've only recently heard about this Hellfire Club." He exchanges glances with Moira, who shrugs at him. "Might I ask where you got this from?" **  
  
** Oh this man was good. Everything about his demeanor screamed that he was telling the truth. He ignored the question and countered with one of his own. "And what is it exactly that you do, Mr. Xavier? Seems a bit lax to not know what is going on in one of your own properties." **  
  
** "I'm a professor of genetics at Oxford, but recently I've been on a sabbatical doing some personal projects." At this Charles seemed to light up, smiling directly at Erik as if this were some kind of cue.  **  
  
** He has no idea what this man expects of him. "And these personal projects don't include nightclubs in Las Vegas, I'm assuming." **  
  
** "Far from it. My line of study involve something far more interesting than that. Tell me, Erik, how much do you know about genetic mutation in humans?"  **  
  
** Erik keeps his face straight. He couldn't know. He was just being paranoid is all, there was no possible way.  **  
  
** "Not too familiar, I'm afraid. You're talking men with six fingers? Siamese twins?" Erik replies in a bored tone, sitting back in his chair. **  
  
** "Yes in fact, but also genetic anomalies that include even more than that. Blue eyes, red hair, these are all mutations, but there are also distinguishers in different human beings that translate as talents. For example, being born with significantly longer legs, or perhaps someone with an extra and yet fully functioning arm." **  
  
** "I can't say that I'm too familiar with the subject no." Erik lies. This harmless looking professor was starting to take on a more ominous light. 

 

 

"So you ensuring that these abominations don't happen? Eugenics?"

 

Schmidt was also interested in genetics and mutations in humans, and it was highly suspicious that this man was interested in the same subject.   **  
  
** Xavier was shaking his head almost before he finished his last word, looking almost offended. "Not at all, not in the sense of fixing, as after all, there is nothing wrong in itself with mutation. Mutation is what took us from single celled organisms to the beings we are today, and each of us have experienced different mutations in our own way. You, for example, have a very interesting mutation."  **  
  
** Erik toys with the napkins on the table, bringing his left hand underneath to loosen one of the knives that was always tucked in between his sleeves. "A mutation? And what exactly would that be? I'm relatively sure that I've got the same amount of arms and toes as everyone else." **  
  
** "Blue eyes are considered a mutation." **  
  
** Erik loosens his grip on the knife and smiles almost in relief. "I don't think most people would consider that to be quite as useful a mutation as an extra arm." **  
  
** Xavier smiles at him as if they are sharing some kind of secret. "It would depend on whom you're speaking to. I would say that that woman there at the bar is using hers to great effect." **  
  
** Erik glances over to see a redhead at the bar flirt shamelessly with the bartender as he poured her a drink, and laughs despite himself.  **  
  
** "I'm not sure if studying girls at bars is quite up to the Oxford standard of research, Mr Xavier."  **  
  
** "A bit flippant perhaps, but still accurate." **  
  
** "So thats it? That's a bit anticlimactic." Erik says, ready to get back on topic. Why would a stripper at a bar in Las Vegas have the card for a genetics professor in New York? **  
  
** Xavier suddenly sobered up, and that piercing gaze was back. "Oh no, Erik. The real mutations I study are something quite different. " He looks almost sad as he continues "Something I think you are quite intimately acquainted with." Shaking his head slightly, he regains his smile and cards his hands through his hair. "If you're interested, I can introduce you to some of us." **  
  
** "Are you sure thats a good idea, Charles?" Moira's voice cut through the air, startling Erik. He had almost forgotten that she was there.  **  
  
** "Oh yes" replies Xavier, still staring at Erik, "I think it might answer a few more of your questions." **  
  
** Erik feels a growing pressure in his skull and he massages the back of his head idly. **  
  
** "And the bill?" **  
  
** "That, I can't answer," he says, frowning. "I truly have no idea. But I have a suspicion that we're searching for the same thing. My office is not too far from here. Will you come?"

**  
** Erik agrees, if only to continue his line of investigation. He's a bit thrown as to how they even got onto this subject, and Charles seems to dodge his questions about Las Vegas quite easily. Charles signals for a bill and signs his tab while still speaking idly about programs to introduce those with different mutations into a more prominent role in society but he’s hardly paying attention, what with what has now turned into a full on migraine.  **  
  
** He finds himself agreeing to visit this man’s office, if only to continue his line of investigation. Xavier seems a bit overly excited at this prospect but Erik thinks himself ready for any ambushes. Xavier would regret having crossed him if this was a trap of any kind. **  
  
** **“** So...Erik,” Moira started, with an emphasis on his name, shooting an annoyed look at Xavier first. “You never did mention what exactly you were looking for. I know you have this document but why are you searching for this place?” **  
  
** Erik suddenly realizes they have been referring to him by his real name for this entire conversation. His mind racing, he curses himself for not realizing it earlier. They clearly recognized him from somewhere, or perhaps only Xavier, Moira had been content to call him by his alias just earlier today and her annoyed expression would explain that she simply didn’t like being lied to. Was this a setup? He scanned the bar again, only seeing the same grad students, no suspicious characters at all. He couldn't sense that Xavier was carrying a weapon of any kind, only Moira was carrying the same gun she had been carrying since the beginning of their acquaintance.  **  
  
** Pushing back his chair, he stands up abruptly, stumbling at the stabbing pain in his head and ready to lash out, human witnesses or no, when Xavier cuts him off with one sharp word.  **  
  
** **“** Erik!” **  
  
** and the world stops.  **  
  
** Students are frozen mid-step. The woman at the bar holds her cup still in midair on its way to her unmoving lips, and even Moira was in an awkward rising position, clearly mid-attempt to protect Xavier from this perceived threat. For the first time in a long time, Erik felt a chill of fear. The stabbing pain in his head grows exponentially and he grabs at the table to steady himself, while trying to calm his breathing.  **  
  
** **“** What is this? What is happening?” **  
  
** Xavier stands up. “Erik, please calm down. Recall I was speaking to you about talented individuals. I did not mention that I too am talented. As are you, I suspect.” **  
  
** **“** How can you do this? How do you know?” Erik’s headache was blinding by now. Had he been somehow drugged? His fingers are clumsy and he drops the knife that was in his hand onto the table. He had to do something, defend himself somehow, but he suddenly can’t quite get in enough air.  **  
  
** **“** Erik! What’s wrong?” Xavier’s face takes on a worried cast and he reaches out as if to touch him but Erik recoils.  **  
  
** **“** Don’t! I can’t...” he feels the tables shaking slightly, the nails holding them together vibrating themselves apart, and then all he can see and remember are blue eyes, and ice, then dark.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This fic is finished, its just taking me a while to upload!

He was warm. Warmer than he could remember being in a long time. He keeps his eyes closed, acutely aware of another warm body lying across his outstretched arm. He cracked one eye open as something was obstructing the other one. Hair? Brown hair. He shifts upwards slightly, careful not to jar...whoever the hell that is. He eases his hand out from under them and shifts upward on the bed, glancing about to room to get any clues. He’s only wearing his underwear, so no luck with figuring out where he came from. The room looks like he has been transported into someone’s grandmothers room, everywhere is light wood paneling and antique furniture. Doilies decorate almost every surface and there are honest to god figurines on the nightstand of vaguely angelic looking children. Did he fall into bed with someone’s grandmother?  **  
  
** She lets out a soft moan and shifts onto her back. Definitely nobody’s grandmother. She had soft brown hair that was all mussed, and her coral lips were slightly opened, creating a rather sensual effect. A black tank top covered her breasts and Erik hopes to god that shes wearing underwear underneath the sheet thats currently covering her midsection. **  
  
** This was completely idiotic. He wishes he could remember why he would have thought that this could have ever been a good idea. It had to be a one night stand. There was no way he would get into another relationship with a woman after Magda. Or at least until he had figured out what the hell was wrong with his memory **  
  
** Silently panicking, Erik eases himself off the bed and tries to locate his pants. **  
  
“** They’re over the top of the door.” An amused voice sounded from behind him. **  
  
** Her arm is draped across her eyes, but her smirk is clearly visible. “...where you threw them last night.” **  
  
“** ...Ah.” Erik says intelligently, inching towards the door. “I have a...I have to-” **  
  
“** Go? After what you told me last night?” Her voice had gotten slightly more sultry. **  
  
“** I’m sorry, I don’t usually...I have a condition that doesn’t quite allow me to remember-” **  
  
** He’s interrupted by laughter. She is...laughing at him. He wished he could tell if this was a normal reaction or not, but it certainly wasn’t his first expected reaction. **  
  
“** Calm down Romeo, nothing happened.” She props herself off the bed, shifting her brown hair back over her shoulder. “Don't you remember what happened at all? ” **  
  
** Erik stares at her blankly.  **  
  
“** Right.” she sighs, before she gets off the bed and picks up a button down shirt off the floor. “So you were telling the truth. Or you're a very good actor, Magnus Eisenhardt, aka Erik Lehnsherr. You're lucky that Charles is vouching for you."  **  
  
** Erik blinks at the name, but didn't otherwise react.  **  
  
** "Let me make this easy for you. You passed out last night at Mulligan's. I was ready to call the ambulance but Xavier declined, so I'm assuming what happened was some kind of telepath thing.  **"**

Telepath thing? Erik has no idea what this woman is talking about but he nods uncertainly, unwilling to show his ignorance.

The door opens and a dark haired young man in a doctor's lab coat walks in, immediately turning beet red and then making a U-turn. He's about to close back the door behind him when Moira nudges it open with her foot.

 

"Hank, it's alright. Nothing untoward is going on in here, I assure you. I just wanted to see how Mr. Lehnsherr here's story checked out." she laughs, dragging the intensely uncomfortable man back into the room.

 

"Right. Um...well Mr. Lehnsherr, Professor Xavier had to run, but he wanted me to let you know that you can feel free to use whatever you like in the house. We ran some scans and it didn't seem like you had anything physical wrong with you." Hank adjusts the thin wire framed glasses that were perched on the edge of his nose. "We had to assume that you were just particularly sensitive to Professor Xavier's telepathy."

 

"Telepathy." Erik repeats.

 

"Right. Moira was telling me about your form of retrograde amnesia. It's actually quite interesting, I've never seen anything like it before. What was the last thing you remember?"

 

Erik glances at the girl next to him, presumably Moira. After Schmidt he didn't trust doctors, and he especially didn't trust doctors asking after his memory problem.

 

"What am I doing here?" he asks, ignoring the boy's question.

 

Hank looked surprised. "Well you agreed to come back with Professor Xavier last night, so he just assumed...well once you passed out, we assumed you had nowhere else to go."

 

A telephone rang somewhere deeper into the house and Hank turns away from them. "Excuse me just a second," he says as he goes to answer it.

 

Moira's sitting on the edge of the bed, and he twitches a bit as he sees she's holding one of his knives in her hand, idly flipping it on its edge. "So what is it you can do? Considering you were looking for Xavier with a fake name."

 

"What do you mean by 'do'?" He asks, his guard on high. He might have told his real name to this woman but there was no way he revealed his power casually to a human.

 

"Charles does his freaky mind thing, right? And then there's Hank's feet. So, I'm assuming you have more than just blue eyes." Moira said, flipping the knife again.

 

Erik is just about to question her more thoroughly when Hank bursts back into the room. "Moira! The Caspartina has just pulled into dock."

 

Moira's attention focuses on Hank, and she drops Erik's knife back to the bed. "Tell me everything." she says sternly, glancing back at Erik briefly before she follows Hank out of the room.

 

Erik is left there, confused and half irritated at their complete lack of regard. He reaches into his pants pocket and pulls out a piece of paper that has an address and the word Schmidt underlined three times under it, and an additional note "Charles F Xavier, not Schmidt" written in what looked like different ink. Well that would've been convenient. There's a photograph in his other pocket, and his eyes widen as he recognizes the man standing in the background of the photo. Schmidt is standing near a boat named...Caspartina!

 

He's out the door several minutes later, hailing a taxi.

 

 

 

****

 

_He's found him. He's finally found him. The snow falls lightly from the sky, almost picturesque, completely in contrast with what he had planned for this day. His tormentor walked ahead, covered in a giant fur jacket with his hand on a young blonde woman's shoulders. She was also decked out in white furs, and her blonde hair was not quite as pale as the snow falling around then, but close. He was so tired of searching for this man that he doesn't even feel the rush of relief that he thought he would have. All he feels is this silence, this waiting. A sense of inevitability._

_“Herr Docktor,” he calls out, but the snow swallowed up his words. He grips the coin in his hand so hard that he can feel the edges of the coin warping, yielding to his grip._

_The man turns around, as if he had sensed Erik standing there behind him. His hated features change into a look of surprise at first, and then a broad smile split his face. As if Erik were a son coming home. He hates that smile._

 

_****_

 

He's been waiting on the shore for hours watching the Caspartina float silently in the water. He lifts his binoculars and rubs his eyes to get the grit out. He's been watching each and every person who makes their way onto that boat and he hasn't seen Schmidt yet, but he has seen several of the people who had featured in photos with the man. He briefly considered sneaking on and moonlighting as one of the guests, but he only saw 2 or 3 people on the boat. It looked like it was a private party.

 

And so he waits.

 

A man with dark brown hair comes out of a small door in the back, his arm around what looked like a shapely young blond, and Erik felt the hairs on the back of his neck raise. He zooms in his binoculars as far as they could go, focusing on this man. Turn around, he wills silently, but he knows already. He knew from the moment this man came out.

 

Schmidt. It had to be.

 

He lets out a short breath, lowering his binoculars. The anger is starting to build in him and good, he will need it. Today is the last day. Today he will finish this. All thoughts about anyone else forgotten, he zips up his stolen wetsuit up to his neck and slips silently into the water silently.

 

It takes him some time to swim out to the boat, and he uses the anchor chain to stabilize himself, breathing hard from the exertion. He can't fail this time. The metal sides of the Caspartina provide excellent hand holds for him as he silently makes his way over, holding his knife in his teeth.

 

He can hear voices laughing from here and it boils his blood to know that while he's been suffering and fucking killing himself to get here, this man is drinking champagne on yachts and not having a concern in the world. Well he's about to get one. He hoists himself over the side of the railing of the boat, trying to keep as silent as possible. Erik crouches and runs quickly towards the sound of lowered voices, stepping out into the open with his knife raised.

 

“You!” he exclaims, only seeing the blond woman standing at the helm. She's holding a martini glass in one hand and is achingly familiar. He's seen her before...possibly with Schmidt in the past? She blinks at him in surprise, the formerly distracted look on her face gone in an instant. “Where is he?” he grows.

 

“Little Erik Lehnsherr.” she says slowly, a wicked smile curving onto her face. “Still chasing, I see.”

 

Erik pauses, suddenly unsure of what she means.

 

“Where is he?” he asks again, looking around the dock. She says nothing, her smile mocking and infuriating. He starts to advance on her, knife in hand. Schmidt had been right here. There were no boats around the Caspartina currently, so he had probably gone below decks when Erik wasn't looking. There was nowhere to hide from him below decks. He would kill her first, and then go after him. 

 

_You didn't think it would be that easy did you?_

 

The voice cuts through his head like a cold wind, breaking his focus and causing him to gasp in pain. This feeling, he remembers it, its the last cold feeling he remembered before...before what?

 

“He's here to kill you,” he hears her say out loud, but he can't see who she's talking to. 

 

He clutches his hand to his head, crying out. He has to focus but he can feel her invasion in his mind, and it 's  _ her, _ the blond woman in the snow, in his photos, he's dreamed of her before. He can sense her cold amusement at his perceived helplessness and that fills him with some much rage that he he pushes at her, screams at her to GET OUT and sends the knife flying towards her.

 

Her hand snaps out and grabs the knife in a suddenly crystalline hand, and he barely has time to be surprised at her sudden transformation before her fist slams into his chest like a wrecking ball, and he flies off the side of the ship.

 

He hits the water  _ hard _ , and immediately starts struggling to swim, trying to breathe past the pain in his chest and head. He'd come so close. So close, and he'd failed. Schmidt was going to get away. 

 

No.

 

No, not this time. Erik feels rage overtake him and he casts about with his powers, searching for some way to get back onto the boat. He had gotten way too close to allow this man to escape again, yet again. He would die first. He would take them all with him!

 

He doesn't even remember how he lifted the anchor chain, but he sends it crashing through the boat, leaving destruction in its wake. He screams, whipping it around and back again, locked on like a homing signal on the brown haired man whom he can see is fleeing with Frost-Schmidt!! He disappears below deck but Erik's prepared for him, and sends the anchor crashing through the second layer of the boat.

 

There are other ships in the water, and the metal distracts him, causing him to lose his grip on the massive anchor, and it splashes into the water with a giant plume. He grins fiercely and starts to swim closer to the boat, when the ship suddenly changes somehow. The bottom falls out and what looks like an honest to god submarine jets out, deep into the water.

 

The rapidly sinking ship sends waves crashing over his head and he tries not to choke on the water.. He's losing him! He sinks under the waves, pouring all of his energy into his powers and latches onto the tail of the submarine, desperately yanking the ship back to him. He can't hold the entire thing, he feels his grip slipping but he will...not...let...him..get...away!

 

Dark spots begin to fly in front of his vision and his lungs start to burn. He won't let go. He can't!

 

Suddenly, arms come out from behind him and wrap around his torso, breaking his concentration.

 

_You have to let go Erik._

 

The voice sounds like it's coming from every direction at once, and he fights it, he can't allow any more distractions. It's taking all of him just to hold on and he will NOT allow Schmidt to escape again. He's blinded from the dark churning water in front of him and his lungs are burning him. He turns to fight off this new opponent, enraged at the interruption. The submarine breaks free from his control but he turns back and throws out his power desperately, latching onto a fin of a propeller. He couldn't think past just getting hold of the massive ship, and didn't have anything more in him to throw at it to draw it towards him

 

_Calm your mind Erik! You'll die!_

 

A sudden forced calm comes over his mind and his powers desert him as the rage fades. He opens his mouth to scream angrily but water rushes in, choking him. Struggling up to the surface, he pushes away at the arms around him, shoving Xavier away.

 

_Erik. I know how much this means to you, but you have to calm your mind, you'll die for nothing!_

 

Erik tries his best to shove the voice away mentally. “Get off me!” he pushes at Xavier again. “How are you in my head?” he cries, not a little afraid.

 

“Don't you remember?” Xavier yells over the clash of the water. “You have your tricks and I have mine.” His head disappears underwater for a second and Erik dives under to pull him back up, holding him up by the waist.

 

_Now might be a good time to mention that I'm not a particularly good swimmer_

 

Erik's incredulous laugh only allows more water to get into his mouth and he can only cough in response. He doesn't know how or why he knows this man, but his name had come as freely to his mind as his older memories did. He could still feel the man intertwined in his thoughts, calming and far more warm than Frost's earlier attempt.

 

“You're not alone anymore, Erik.” Xavier yells over the crash of the water, and Erik feels himself calm further, holding the other man up. He believes him. 

 

A life ring is thrown out to them from one of the other ships that had gathered near Caspartina during the fight, and he grasped on to it, hauling Xavier onto the edge.

 

The other man looked rather pathetic on deck, having immediately been smothered by blankets as soon as they got on board.

 

“What the hell were you thinking Xavier?” a brunette woman yells, rubbing her hands up and down his shoulders in an attempt to warm him up. “The water was freezing!” 

 

It's Moira, the same woman from earlier, and her expression is priceless as she catches a glimpse at Erik dripping on the deck in his stolen wetsuit.

 

“You again!?”

 

“I couldn't leave him Moira. Did you see what he did-- Erik, my god it was amazing.” Xavier's face was very pale as he shivered in the night air, but his smile took over most of his face. 

 

Erik had no idea what was going on. “What I did...” He couldn't really believe that he had been able to lift such a heavy anchor chain. It already seemed like a blur even though it had just happened. And Xavier was just like him, like him ...and Frost. Frost! He looks out over the railing of the boat, at the sinking fragments of the Caspartina.

 

“I have to go after him.”

 

He turns away and heads to the railing, ready to do...he doesn't even know what, before a hand reaches out and snags his wrist.

 

Xavier's eyes are serious, cutting off the objections that he had building in his throat. “You can't, Erik. He's gone. “

 

Erik tries and fails to wrench his wrist loose with a growl of frustration. “Why did you stop me?”

 

“You would've drowned, and he would have gotten away anyway.” Xavier responded in a sharp tone. “We can find out where he's heading. I'll need you to trust me.”

 

That was a laugh. “Trust you.” he repeats.

 

“Yes. I mean you no harm Erik, and I trust you'll have some questions..” Xavier's hand felt very warm against his wrist, and he felt the other man tug a bit. “Come. You'll catch your death of cold.”

 

****

 

They had stripped Erik out of his wetsuit and given him clothes to borrow. He sat below decks in what looked like an empty officer's cabin on one of the bolted down chairs in front of a desk. His arm was stretched out in front of him and he was slowly dabbing a iron needle that he had siphoned off the the back of the chair frame into the ink of a pen he had broken in half. He pricks himself, over and over, finishing a rough tattoo of the name Caspartina and the submarine. He'd left his bag with the photos and his camera on the docks, and besides, this he wanted to stay with him. Judging from the amount of agents that he very much doubted were Coast Guard on the ship, he thought it was a good thing that he had left those particular photos on the docks in any case. He had no prepared answers to any questions about those dead men.

 

Xavier...hearing the other man's voice in his head had not been as much of a shock as he would have thought it was. The man clearly knew him from an earlier time and Erik seemed to instinctively know his name and face, but everything else about him was shrouded in mystery.

 

Speaking of the devil, Xavier's hair poked in through the crack in the door and he knocked once.

 

“May I come in?”

 

Erik nods, still dabbing the needle into his arm. It hurt like hell, and he was no tattoo artist, but there wasn't any available alternatives here, and he wasn't sure if he was going to be able to come out of this with any belongings.

 

He looked looks impossibly young in what Erik assumed were a pair of borrowed sweatpants and sweatshirt, his hair still mussed from getting wet.

 

“Well, I've convinced them not to immediately arrest you, you might be happy to know.” Xavier sits down heavily on a chair next to the bed, eyeing Erik's work with some curiosity.

 

Erik doesn't respond, hand hovering over the last stroke of the 'a' in Caspartina. “You asked me to trust you.”

 

“Yes.” Xavier's response is immediate. “I know it might be hard for you right now but I believe I am the best choice of allies that you have at the moment.”

 

Allies? Erik had never seen anyone do what this man had done. “And you have powers...like me” he repeats, barely able to believe it.

 

“ Exactly like you, no.” The man smiles again, and its like the sun coming up. “I haven’t quite encountered anyone just like you before, Erik. But we are similar in the fact that we are both mutants.” **  
  
** Mutants. Erik let out a breath to hear himself so named and tries to calm down. Start from the beginning.

 

“How do I know you? Why are you so familiar?” he asks, almost desperately.

 

“We met before, as I said, at Mulligans. You fainted after I showed you my power there the first time.”

 

Erik remembers no such thing, but feels a spark of hope that he at least remembered something. Could it be that he was finally starting to heal?

 

“Hank told me about your retrograde amnesia. Is anyone else familiar to you?” Charles asks curiously. 

 

“No. Just you,” And Frost, he adds mentally. “So you're a CIA agent.”

 

“No, I'm normally a professor of genetics. You can say right now I'm in a bit of a consulting role.”

 

People like him, walking free...having normal lives. Theoretically he had known it had to have been true, but seeing it in person was quite different. And what a power! Erik repeated the word he had heard Moira say earlier out loud.

 

“Telepath.”

 

Instantly a voice filled his head, a lot more subtle and subdued than before.

 

_I haven't met anyone quite like you before either, but from what I can see, what you do Erik...its marvelous._

 

Erik jerks in surprise again. He doesn't think he's ever going to get used to that.

 

“This...speaking through minds trick. You can do it to anyone? You can see anyone's mind.” he asks out loud. 

 

_I haven't yet met a person for whom I cannot. Some are more difficult than others. Usually those people are mutants like us._

_  
_ The voice curls around his mind, filling him with a comforting warmth.

 

“And mine?”

 

_Yours is a bit easier...it stands out, to say the least. The only way I can adequately describe it is a glow of sorts. All mutants have it, but you...you shine so brightly I can't help but reach out._

The words were accompanied by a faint feeling of awe and amazement and Erik felt himself flush involuntarily.

 

“It took me a while to sense you on the ship, otherwise I would have gotten to you sooner. I was being blocked,” Xavier said out loud, frustrated. “I've never encountered someone else of my own kind before.”

 

“You mean the girl.” Erik remembered her power in his mind, and how helpless it made him. The next jab of the needle was a bit harder than necessary, and he hissed as a bead of blood welled up. 

 

“Emma Frost, yes. An associate of Sebastian Shaw, whom you know as Klaus Schmidt.”

 

Erik looks up sharply. “Where did you hear that name? What do you know about me?”

 

Xavier winces slightly and avoids his eyes. “I may have gotten a bit more from your mind that I had intended when I saved you in the water.”

 

“What do you know about me?” Erik repeats, almost afraid.

 

Xavier's eyes are very blue in the candlelight. “Everything.”

 

Erik lets out a low breath. He expected that he would feel something, panic, anything at those words, but instead he felt the same feeling of calm that he did when he was in the water and Xavier was wrapped up in his mind. This man was more dangerous than he had ever imagined.

 

“And there is no way to defend against you?”

 

Xavier looks up, eyes hurt. “I will stay out of your mind if you want me to, Erik. All you have to do is ask, and I will not intrude.”

 

Erik finds himself shaking his head before Xavier even finished his sentence. It wasn't even that he minded Xavier talking directly into his head, he admitted to himself. He didn't care about his more recent memories, considering that he could barely remember anything himself, whoever wanted to view those was welcome to it. But his older memories...those were all he had, and he was loathe to share them, even with someone like Xavier.

 

“The talking mind to mind thing is actually giving me a bit of a headache, actually.” he admits, and its true. He can feel it building slowly in his mind.

 

“Interesting.” Xavier leans in closer, staring into his eyes as if he could see right through them. “It's similar to what had happened when I spoke to you last time, at Mulligans. Did you feel it too when you communicated with Frost?”

 

Erik recalled the sharp, cold feeling of Frost's mind cutting through his, absolutely nothing like how Xavier felt.

 

“Not quite,” he says, rubbing his head. “So this ship...it's CIA, for whom you are consulting for?”

 

“The ship is under the command of the CIA, who I am assisting in the search for Shaw. “

 

“So you  _ are _ CIA.”

 

“No, my involvement is a bit more...complicated. And not made any simpler after I met you, Erik.”

 

“Explain.”

 

“Sebastian Shaw...there isn't much known of him, but officially he's known as the head of Hellfire Inc, a simple entertainment company that owns strip clubs and bars all over the country. The company is legitimate, but investigations into the flagship establishment in Las Vegas have proved that it is also been a cover for illegal drugs and weaponry. He has also been traced to various high ranking military officials and politicians who have been witnessed at the Hellfire club. Long story short, he's got his fingers in quite a number of pies.”

 

Xavier ran his hand through his hair, staring at the candlelight with a troubled expression on his face. “Normally this wouldn't be any of my concern, but my business is mutation. When the CIA discovered that Shaw was making the use of mutants like ourselves, they came to me, being the only source of information that they could find. I came here, in an attempt to help before Shaw does something terrible.”

 

He hesitates before continuing. “ Normally this information would be top secret, but I think it would be in your best interest to know. Shaw had long been in suspected contact with Russian officials concerning the current controversy with regards to the placement of missiles in Cuba.”

 

Erik thought about it for a while. The story made sense, but he was sure that Xavier was hiding something.

 

“There's something else.” he said, suddenly certain of it.

 

Xavier looks up, surprised.

 

“I don't think you would be in this deep if that were simply it.” Erik starts on the final a of 'Caspartina'. 

 

“And you know me so well, now?” Xavier's smile turns suddenly dangerous, but Erik saw that it was the last resort of a man trying to cover something up.

 

“You want me to trust you right?” Erik finishes the last flourish on the a and catches Xavier's eye, deadly serious. 

 

The telepath gives him a wry smile and leans forward, jostling the table a bit. “And here I thought I was the mindreader.”

 

Erik stares at him, refusing to be put off.

 

“Right,” Xavier muttered, running his hands through his hair again. “Let me preface that with a question of my own. You had a card of mine, with something written on the back, when we found you at Mulligans. I suppose its too much to hope for that you remember who gave you that card?” 

 

Erik shook his head. “I don't remember. What did it say?”

 

Xavier pulls the card out of a side pocket in his sweatpants. He flips it over to show the handwriting 'If you need help”

 

“That's not my handwriting.”

 

“Yes, thats rather the point. It's my sisters.”

 

Erik shook his head. “If the note is not in my own handwriting, I normally disregard it. I have a system, and I can't trust that other people tampering with it.

 

Xavier sighed “Right. I suppose it was too much to hope for. I'm looking for my sister. She's a mutant, much like me. We had a...disagreement back at home, and she left.”

 

Erik feels like there was a whole lot more to that story that Xavier wasn't telling him, but he took it at its face value. “Of her own free will?”

 

“Yes. After she had left, we still kept in touch, its rather hard to hide from me. But several months ago, she just dropped off the map. Completely disappeared, and I don't know what that means,” Xavier's voice became tight, and his fists clenched. “I don't know what Shaw has to do with it, but I've been informed that she was last seen in company with Frost and several others. I just need to know she's OK, that he isn't coercing her somehow, or that she isn't-” Xavier trails off, seeming unable to say it.

 

Theres a long silence where neither of them look at each other, each lost in their own world before Xavier looks over at the angry red skin of Erik's arm.

 

“An unorthodox journaling method,” he says.

 

“It gets the job done,” The pain was sharp and the fresh wound was angry and red underneath the black ink, but Erik was certain that it would stay.

 

“May I?” Xavier lifted his hand to his head.

 

“What are you planning?” Erik leaned back a bit, suspicious. His headache was bad enough at the moment

 

“Just a simple trick.”

 

Erik hesitates before nodding once. His arm was throbbing, and as Xavier lifted his hand to his head and, he could feel the pain receding from his arm until it was only a muted ache.

 

“How did you do that?” He asked, amazed, twisting his arm back and forth with no pain. The skin was still angry and red, but it was no longer sending stabbing pains up the rest of his arm. 

 

“Pain is mostly in the mind.” Xavier caught his arm and brought it back down to the table, eyes roving over the other older tattoos on his skin. “Doing this is dangerous though, its how the mind tells us something is wrong. So I don't do it often. Just this once.”

 

Just the thought that Xavier  _ could _ do it was enough to give Erik goosebumps. Was there anything he could hide from this man? Was there even a point to the telepath lying to Erik? He could just implant something, anything, he wanted in Erik's mind and he would believe it, no questions asked. He could do it to all of them, assuming his power extended to multiple people. 

 

Erik looked away, thinking hard for a minute before he he turned his hand over and covered Xavier's with it.

 

“I believe you.”

 

He might not have remembered much about what he'd done the day before, or anything, really about this man, but heaven help him, Erik believed him. Since his memory normally failed him, he had learned to trust his instincts more often that not, and right now they were telling him that this man was telling the truth, or at least most of it.

 

“Erik...at its surface, we're searching for the same thing. Let me help you.” Xavier said, reaching his other hand over to grip their hands further together.

 

“I can't promise that I'll help you find your sister,” Erik confesses. “And I don't know why you'd be so eager to help me.”

 

“I told you in the water that you're not alone anymore. I don't quite want to let you go yet.”

 

Erik feels a warm pleased feeling go through him at the thought. Xavier laughs and pulls him up from the bed. “Come. We have a long way to go before we reach headquarters, and the suits want to interrogate you. I'll make sure its not too painful.”

 

“I didn't think you had that much clout,” Erik jokes weakly, still trying to figure this man out. 

 

Xavier winks and taps his forehead slightly. “I”ll just help them along a bit.”

 

He stiffens at the implications, still slightly uncomfortable with the range of this man's power.

 

“Kidding, Erik,” Xavier sighs, holding the door open. “Lets go.”

 

****  


 

“ _Little Erik!” he says in German, pushing the young blonde behind him. So it looked like he at least realized that it would come to a fight. Erik had imagined this moment so often in his mind that he almost didn't believe that he would have gotten here. That he would be standing here in front of this man, ready to avenge his parents. To avenge himself._

 

_The doctor is speaking, but he doesn't hear. Doesn't hear anything but the tone of that hated voice, bringing him back to little rooms inside of Auschwitz, back thorough those iron gates and into his laboratory where he had cut out Erik's humanity, piece by piece._

 

_Frankenstein's Monster._

 

_So he would play the role of a monster here. He would show Schmidt just how monstrous he'd become._


	5. Chapter 5

Xavier is still staring at him.   
  
He's in the backseat of a car, haven woken up from apparently nodding off. He looks out the window he had been leaning against to see miles of highway stretches out in front of him. A brunette woman is driving the car, sitting next to another unfamiliar man in a dark suit. He was pressed up against the left side of the car, and Xavier was twisted towards him, biting idly on a thumbnail and leaning his head on the backseat.  
  
“CIA Headquarters in Langley.”  
  
“Excuse me?”  
  
“You want to know where we're heading.”  
  
Erik blinks, unsure what to say in response that would sound more intelligent than 'what'.   
  
“This is the first time I've seen it actually happen,” Xavier continues, his unnervingly familiar gaze still fixed on Erik. “You were having a bad dream while sleeping. I was going to wake you up. And then right in the middle of it, you calmed, but your entire face...it wasn't as if you had broken out of a nightmare. It was as if the nightmare had never happened. Almost as if someone had hit a reset switch.”  
  
Erik has no idea what Xavier's talking about and it must show on his face, because the other man takes his thumbnail out of his mouth and reaches out for Erik's arm, pushing up the sleeve to bare a bright red newly made tattoo that read 'Caspartina'.   
  
“Do you remember any of this?”  
  
Erik shook his head, examining the tattoo closely. Nothing. He lifted his hips to dig in his pockets to see if he had his usual notes but Xavier puts out his hand and presses softly on his chest, driving back down to the seat.  
  
“I want to try something. You remember what I am.”  
  
Erik nods. He's not sure why, but he's almost positive that this man is a telepath, and that he's met him before, but he doesn't know the circumstances. He feels comfortable enough in his presence that he assumes that the man is an ally.   
  
Xavier leans forward and places his hand along the side Erik's' head, and he recoils slightly. “What exactly were you planning on doing?”  
  
“I have memories of what happened. I was planning on showing them to you.” Xavier offers, hands still hovering. “At the very least it would save time.”  
  
Erik hesitates. He doesn't necessarily want other people's memories in his mind. But then again, memories for him are so transient, if Xavier wanted to take advantage of him, he would be in for a surprise in a a couple of hours or days.  Xavier waited patiently, his face taking on a bit of a pleading cast.   
  
“I promise, I won't pry.”  
  
Erik grudgingly agrees, and shifts sideways so that he's completely facing Xavier. He feels a bit strange that he  already trusts this man enough to do this, considering that he just met him. Who was this man to him?  He ignores the curious glances of the man in the front, if this works he'll know who he is shortly.  
  
It starts as a warm pressure in the back of his mind and then suddenly the car drops away to a whirling sideshow. He can't say how long he's stuck watching a stream of images, all focused on him. It was strange to watch himself from this vantage point, and he gasps a little as the scenes speed up, Erik destroying the Caspartina, Erik almost rattling the table at Mulligan's apart, Erik fighting Charles in the water, Erik dipping a makeshift needle into ink; Moira, Erik's face by candlelight, Erik slipping slowly out of a wetsuit, water running down his bare chest. He flushed as he felt a warm surge of lust at the sight that was not his own, and then suddenly a great deal of embarrassment flooded his mind right before the connection broke.   
  
“Er, ” he starts, still reeling from the information spinning in his head.  
  
Charles- no, Xavier is bright red, looking for all the world like he wanted to jump right back in and wipe all of those memories out of Erik's head, and so Erik leans back slightly, covering his head with his hands. He already had a headache, he didn't need an even greater one.   
  
“I am...so sorry. I think I might have gone a bit overboard.”  
  
It was cute really, how pink and flustered the telepath got when he was embarrassed.   
  
“It's nothing,” Erik says, still trying to reorient his thoughts. “I'm not hurt or anything.”  
  
“Well.” Xavier clears his throat, looking anywhere but Erik's eyes. “At least that was a bit of a success. Do you remember any of that now that I've shown it to you, or is it all new?”  
  
Erik shakes his head slowly. Most of the encounters had been completely unfamiliar. He wasn't remembering the scenes as they were playing back, it was more like being told a story rather than living through one. It was a lot to take in. He had apparently almost killed Schmidt but it seemed like he was now on the path to tracking him down. And with allies no less. He smirked as he played back the last memory that he had seen and eyed Xavier in a new light.  There were homosexuals in the camps; and Erik remembers experimenting after his escape when he was younger and more bitter against a God who had seemingly deserted him, but his sexual encounters with males were far and few in between before he met Magda, and after her, nothing at all.  Was he...involved with the man?   
  
Xavier was particularly attractive, what with that almost feminine red mouth and aristocratic features. His eyes were his best feature, the sort of blue that would attract all sorts of attention. His hair looked soft and inviting and he looked well shaped in the tailored brown suit he was currently wearing, miles ahead of the lumpy tweed Erik saw in his borrowed memories. His apparent interest in Erik was more than a bit flattering.   
  
“Oh god” Xavier mutters, still pink. “Forget most of that, except the relevant parts. I haven't yet been as successful as I'd like transferring memories without accompanying emotions, and your mind is so receptive to connection that its almost ridiculously simple to accidentally over share and--” he calms himself, taking a deep breath. “Right. Let's focus here.”  
  
Erik opens his mouth to quip on what he knew Xavier had been “focused” on, when Xavier halts his joke with a stern glare. “We have some planning to do.”  
  
“We're almost there, so when you and Romeo stop making eyes at each other in the back, you might want to consider what you're going to tell the top brass.” the woman in the front, Moira, said.   
  
“Romeo?” Xavier questions, eyebrows raising.   
  
Erik shrugs. He had no idea either.  
  
“So is it all metal?” Xavier abruptly changed the subject, and it took a minute for Erik to figure out what he meant.  
  
“Metal and Magnetism,” He replies. “Purer metals are easier to manipulate than alloys, but it depends. I find steel a lot easier to work with than something like gold.”  
  
Xavier nods thoughtfully.  He wonders if Xavier knows how personal and precious his powers are to him. It helped a bit knowing that he wasn't the only one. Schmidt had pronounced him as a god, but it was quite different to meet another one.   
  
He spent the rest of the ride examining the new memories that he had received thoughtfully.   
  
In the CIA Headquarters, it seemed like the word was out on his mutant status, and he endured several probing meetings over what he could do, when he could do it and whether he was telling the truth. Most of the questions were the same things he had answered on the ship, and more than once he was ready and willing to give the whole thing up as a bad job and just walk out. Usually it was during those moments that Xavier would find an excuse to stop by, argue the person speaking to Erik into submission, and then disappear. Erik didn't particularly need the help, but he found the rather overprotective behavior from Xavier amusing. Like a tiny guard dog.  
  
“I heard that.”  
  
Making a face at him, Xavier joins him in hallway on his way to yet another interrogation session disguised as a meeting.   
  
“I am not tiny.”  
  
Erik hides his smile with a cough, ignoring the curious glances of his personal 'security detail'. 'Serves you right for being nosy.' he thinks as hard as he could. Xavier give a tiny noise of surprise, staring wide eyed at Erik. He hopes he had done it right, it was the first time in memory he'd tried to communicate mentally with the other telepath.   
  
“I'm not being nosy, you just think very loudly.” he replies a bit too late. He was obviously pleased at the attempt, so Erik figures he had done it more or less correctly.  
  
“So far we only have information on several of Shaw's current associates.” A heavy set man  who went by the name of Sanders stood in front of a small meeting room. Several blown up photos had been set up against the wall. The first was young woman with long blond hair and blue eyes smiling into the camera. She looked like she couldn't have been more than seventeen years old, and was exceptionally beautiful. “Raven Darkholme, last seen in the company of Emma Frost.” the man pauses at this and glances at Xavier, whose face had turned to stone. “our sources assure us that she is non-compliant and may be considered a hostage. She is a shape shifter, and as such, may take the form of any other human.”  
  
 He turns to the next photograph. “Emma Frost. Long term associate of Sebastian Shaw and primary executor of all his affairs. Considered extremely dangerous.”  
  
Erik stiffened. That woman seemed about as familiar as Xavier, and the name rang out in his mind, triggering a faint memory of...ice? “She's the telepath.” he whispers to Xavier, not sure why he was certain of this.  
  
“Yes. She was the one who was blocking my attempts to read Shaw's mind on the Caspartina before you decided to kill us all.”  
  
Agent Sanders continues, “ Sources have recently discovered that  Emma Frost is of the same mutant class as Charles Xavier, telepath,” There was an uncomfortable shifting in the room as each and every other human agent looked away from Xavier. “We currently have no known defense against this threat, and would advise all agents to approach her with extreme caution.”  
  
Erik turns to Xavier again. “I recognize her in the same way I recognize you. Why? Do you think it might be a side effect of your telepathy?”  
  
“I'm not sure. I've never connected with someone with retrograde amnesia. It may be that you have encountered her before.”  
  
Erik stares at the photograph as if trying to burn her likeness into his mind. He didn't know...he had clearly encountered Moira before and still didn't remember who she was earlier today.  “When you were in my memory...is it something a telepath can do? Do you think she might have had something to do with it?”  
  
Xavier shakes his head. “You mean, if it was something that a telepath could have done?. It may be possible but I wouldn't even know where to start something like that. Taking away a memory...its easy. Destroying the capability to create new memories, without just wiping the mind of the person like a blank slate is something else. It should be almost impossible, particularly for it to last for a long time outside the influence of the original telepath.”  
  
Erik sits back, feeling a wave of bitter disappointment rush through him. It would have been convenient if this were something that Xavier could fix. Perhaps if his memory wasn't so faulty, if it wasn't so fucking useless, Schmidt would have been dead by now.  He feels a tentative wave of apology coming from the telepath seated next to him and he throws up an image of a brick wall, blocking him outright. He regrets doing it almost immediately after, as Xavier physically flinches, but he doesn't apologize.  
  
They spend the rest of the meeting in silence.   
  
****  
  
They manage to convince the top brass to continue the search for the last two associates of Shaw on their own. The humans are rather suspicious but Xavier gives some cold truths about their human agents' chances of survival against any of the mutants, particularly another telepath.  It's a close argument, and Erik strongly suspects that Xavier 'helped' the decision a bit, but eventually they are green lighted. Intel had come in that a man who had co-owned the Caspartina with Sebastian Shaw, a Janos Quested, was spotted at a five-star hotel in New York City.   
  
The night before they're set to drive out to the city and Erik is sitting on one of the beds in an empty barrack, inspecting his recently tattooed arm. Where they are going it seems like it may be unlikely that he'll be able to keep a reliable track on his belongings, so he's considering a few more where there's space. He wished that he didn't leave his camera back at the docks and wonders if he could use the CIA allowance to purchase another one.   
  
There's a knock on his door and Erik knows that its Xavier even before he speaks.  
  
“It's me.”  
  
He comes in looking a bit subdued. He'd been quiet ever since Erik had thrown up that brick wall and Erik didn't know how to broach the subject. He wasn't sorry for what he'd done. He didn't mind that the telepath could read his mind, but the casual use of it for his surface thoughts unnerved him. He'd like what was left of his mind to be his and his alone.   
  
“I'd like to apologize, Erik. I fear I may have made you feel a bit uncomfortable at the meeting today.”   
  
Erik silently deems his arm sufficiently non-infected before he turns to face the telepath.  He's still wearing the same tailored brown suit he had worn to the meetings, but his tie and jacket are missing, sleeves rolled up. The look suits him.   
  
Xavier takes a deep breath before continuing. “I won't enter your mind again.”  
  
"It's not that, Xavier."  
  
He looks up, surprised.   
  
"I just..." Erik struggles to articulate what he's feeling into words. "I have so little control over my mind as it is. I lost my temper and took it out on you. I'd just rather you didn't read my mind so casually."  He had a mildly horrifying thought.  
  
"So am I just constantly streaming my thoughts to you?" he asks, immediately trying and failing to clear his mind.   
  
Xavier laughs, a relieved sound. "No, no thats not how it works. If everyone was streaming their thoughts to me at all times I would have gone insane a long time ago," he tentatively joins Erik on the bed, sitting on the edge and stares at his hands. "A lot of mutants develop their abilities either  through a particularly traumatic event, or through puberty."  
  
Erik's mind flashes to the camps, to the moment when he was separated from his parents and the metal in the gates responded to him for the first time. He quickly clears his mind and glances over at Xavier to see if he had caught that flash of memory.   
  
If he did he showed no reaction. "I was born with my ability fully 'on' so to say. There has never been a time in which I've been unable to distinguish different people's thoughts. I learned minds before faces, could communicate before I could even speak. To me, it was a surprise to find that most people couldn't do what I could do. And so I learned to not say what I had learned from their minds out loud, and I learned to shield. It's not as if most of the time I want to hear what other people think about me.” he says with a pained expression.. Erik wants to wipe that expression off his face, it didn't belong there. It was the same expression he wore when he remembered how after he had finally escaped the camps, he couldn't live in peace with the humans, and why it hadn't worked out with Magda. Erik didn't like to think that any of that darkness had rubbed off on Xavier.   
  
"The humans here fear you." he says. They feared Erik too, but Erik encouraged that. He was not like them. He had seen Xavier's face however, when the humans were trying to come up with ways to neutralize Frost if the time came, and he had heard the not-so-quiet whispers of "freak" in the hallways on the way back from the meeting.   
  
"You should see how its like when you can see what they're thinking as well as just hearing it," Xavier says wryly.   
  
"Why do you take it? Why work with men who don't respect you?" Erik questioned, baffled.   
  
"People fear what they don't know. I've come here for my sister yes, but as well to let the world KNOW about mutants. To share that knowledge that we're all the same species and there is nothing to fear. Without that understanding, mutants will always live in fear for their lives. "  
  
Erik doesn't agree, he thought that the humans knew very well what they were and chose to be hateful out of a sense of jealousy. If mutants were the next step on the evolutionary ladder, then it stood to reason that the dying out species would fight until its last breath to prevent that day from coming.   
  
And was he so much better than the humans in denying Xavier his abilities? He had reacted out of the very same fear that had disgusted him when then humans displayed it. He thought about what it must mean to be Xavier, facing that fear from both human and mutant alike. If there was one thing Erik was, it wasn't a coward.   
He decides to try what Xavier had done earlier in the day before he rebuffed him. He concentrates very hard on his  empathy, and his own struggles with hiding his powers from the humans, carefully stripping out any mention of Schmidt.   
  
Xavier gives a choked laugh and leans towards Erik on the bed. "You are quite good at that," His eyes shine bright as he smiles tentatively. "I can't block as well if you're intentionally directing your thoughts to me."  
  
"I know, I was trying that time." he looks down at their hands lying so close together on the bed and puts his hand over the telepath's. "I don't mind," he repeats, "but you have to wait for my permission."  
  
Xavier stares at their hands and then looks up at Erik with an unreadable expression. "And if I'm asking now?"  
  
Erik suddenly gets the sense that they're having two different conversations. "I'd probably say yes."  
  
Xavier leans forward, pressing his lips against Erik's. The kiss is chaste at first, just dry lips resting against his own. The other man makes a move as if to draw back and Erik tightens his grip on his hand before leaning back in to capture his mouth. This time he allows Xavier to coax his mouth open and the kiss turns into something completely different. Xavier's hand slips up into his hair and grips hard, holding his head steady as the other man plunders his mouth. They break away for air and Erik leans his head on the telepath's chest for a moment, gasping.   
  
"Too much?" Xavier-no Charles, if he had the other man's tongue in his mouth he was going to call him by his damn first name-asks.   
  
He doesn't respond, instead tugging the other man forward again, hands fisting into his shirt and kisses  
 him again. He hadn't done anything like this in far too long and Charles' mouth was wet and sweet, tasting faintly of a nightcap and toothpaste. It was intoxicating. He feels the other man's hands smooth their way up his chest and wind around his neck, and he leans back slightly, pulling Charles almost into his lap. The other man moans into his mouth and pressed his body firmly against his. A shock of pleasure jolts through his body and he froze. A nagging feeling in the back of his head would not leave him alone.   
  
Where was this leading? A part of his brain was telling him to roll Charles into the mattress and see what he was hiding under that dress shirt, but his conscience reminded him that he wasn't going to remember any of this in the morning. In the past he had been fine with temporary, anonymous partners since it wasn't as awkward to wake up next to someone who had become a complete stranger virtually overnight. It wasn't fair to either of them. Not to mention the fact that he had never stayed afterwards. The same question he wanted to ask in the car rose up in him again, and this time, he felt it couldn't be ignored.  
  
He breaks the kiss and puts a hand up against Charles' chest to stop him when he leans in again.   
  
"Whats wrong?" he asks, breathless; and his lips are so swollen and red that Erik nearly reconsiders his earlier decision.  
  
“Are we...together?” He asks hesitantly.   
  
Charles leans back to get a better look at his face. “What do you mean?”  
  
“Your memories of me...this kiss. Were we lovers at some point...?'  
  
Charles' expression changes rapidly from longing to slight horror  
  
“Oh god, I wasn't even thinking about- Of course you'd.. I'm terribly sorry Erik...You're right, maybe this isn't the best time. We weren't together before, no, is that why you were-” Charles' face turned bright red with embarrassment. “I just forced myself on you like an animal.”  
  
"It's not that," Erik protests, but doesn't struggle when Charles pushes his way out of his hands  "It's quite OK if-"   
  
"Oh no, quite right, you're quite right. Now is probably not...a good time for either of us, " Charles breaks in, still pink faced and embarrassed and adorable. "I'll just...we have to wake up early tomorrow." He stands from the bed abruptly and tucks in the areas where his shirt had been pulled out by Erik's greedy hands.   
  
Erik feels like Charles was misunderstanding a bit, and he opened his mouth to...say something, to explain what he was thinking, but Charles cut him off standing at the door.  
  
"Well. Goodnight Erik." the door closes softly behind him.   
  
Erik's' head meets the pillow with a frustrated thunk. He didn't know what to think.


	6. Chapter 6

Erik's sitting on a hotel bed, and his hands are covered in blood. He jerks his head up, patting himself down quickly, but he doesn't spot a major injury anywhere besides a dull ache on his arm where a gauze bandage is wrapped. The hotel room looked like a tornado had hit it, shards of glass everywhere. He's got tiny shards of glass embedded in his right hand. The bed is about the only thing that seems to be in its original position, but its also covered in spatters of blood.

 

There's a long trail as if someone dragged a body over to the closet but he's almost afraid to look inside. He gets up slowly and heads towards the closet, shoes crunching in the carpet. He pulls the door open and a bloodied dark haired man tumbles out. One hand is pinned to the closet wall with what looked like an iron spike, and the other was tied to his body with ripped bedsheets. His pinned hand was bleeding sluggishly, and his face was almost unrecognizably swollen. He was still conscious enough to flinch away at Erik's touch, frantic 'mmmmm' noises coming from behind the ripped linen in his mouth.

 

Erik tugs away the linen and leans forward on the wall, shaking his head to try and get rid of the ringing in his ears. "Who are you?" he asks, but the man is too dazed with pain to answer. He undoes the sheets from around the bruised legs of the man and sits him down on the bed.

 

"What happened here?"

 

The man is frantic now, trying to get away from Erik. It doesn't look like like he was going to get anything useful out of now.

 

Did he do this? Was this man alone? He gets up unsteadily, wincing in pain as he realizes that his own leg is bleeding from a shallow gash ripped into his pants. How did Erik get away from the attacker? Was he the attacker? The level of fear coming from the man next to him would indicate something likely, yes. He has to get out of here but he can't leave like this.

 

He runs into the bathroom to wash off the blood and get as much glass out of his hands as possible. His clothing was surprisingly immaculate, only a couple of smears on his sleeve that was easily disguised, and the rip in his dark pants near the leg. He hopes no-one will notice. He hopes that man didn't have allies, or that the attacker didn't return.

 

There's a camera and a piece of paper on the bed that reads 'ERIK' and he grabs them and stumbles out of the room, down the hotel hallway and into the elevator.

 

Outside, he opens the paper and starts to read and halts dead in his tracks.

 

It's...incredible. It has locations, positions, times even, and they all seem to be of Schmidt (alias Sebastian Shaw). There were even what looked like coordinates listed in the corner. He smooths the corners of the papers carefully, eyes skimming down the list. Near the middle of the page were the words

 

Hellfire Inc

 

Emma Frost

 

Mystique

 

XL34

 

There's an address in Russian scribbled on the bottom with arrows heading towards the name 'Emma Frost' and near the name Mystique are several question marks, but connections heading towards both Emma and Shaw.

 

He's not sure what some of these names mean but its as if a lead just dropped from the sky and into his hand.

 

"Erik!"

 

Charles was running towards him from across the street, coming to a halt right in front of him. "I've got the records. Did you get what room Janos was staying in?'

 

"I..." Erik trails off, unsure what to answer. The other man seemed very familiar, and he knew his name as if he had known it for a long time, Charles, but who the hell was Janos Quested? His mind flashes back to the man tied up in the hotel room.

 

Charles eyes him critically. "It's happened again didn't it. You don't remember a thing." He curses and then drags Erik by the arm into an area of the street thats overly shaded by trees.

 

"It's only been a couple of hours!" he hisses, as if Erik knows what he's talking about. "I can't show you what happened if I wasn't there!"

 

Erik shrugs the other man's arm off him. He didn't know what the telepath's problem was, but he didn't appreciate being manhandled.

 

Charles sighs. "You know who I am, right?"

 

"A telepath whose getting on my nerves."

 

"..Right." Charles looked at him curiously. "You're remembering more about me, I think."

 

"I wouldn't be able to tell."

 

"Anyway, we're wasting time. I can find out what room Janos is in from the hotel manager, hopefully he checked in himself and used his real name. Do you mind if I fill you in?" Charles holds up a hand to his forehead.

 

"Wait wait, fill me in on what?"

 

"Just trust me, Erik."

 

Erik reluctantly nods, unsure why he's acquiescing so easily, and seconds later his eyes widen. "Ah." It felt as if someone had just dropped a filing cabinet full of information in his head.

 

He feels Charles retreating from his mind, with the usual accompanying mild headache.

 

"Janos...Spanish, long hair, a bit skinny?"

 

"You saw him?" Charles says in a surprised tone.

 

"You could say that." Well that was one question answered. He hands over the paper to Charles who skims it over, eyes widening.

 

"This is...this is amazing! Erik, how did you get this information?"

 

"Janos must have told me." Erik admits, only to be met an incredulous stare.

 

"You confronted him alone? Why didn't you wait?"

 

'The opportunity was there and I took it." Erik shrugs, annoyed already at this line of questioning. "I couldn't wait for you."

 

"Erik.." Charles continues slowly. "Why did he give you this information?”

 

"I didn't say he gave it up voluntarily." Erik says, thinking of the blood stains on the wall where he had nailed Janos. It was becoming more clear what had happened. He clearly had persuaded Janos to tell him information on Schmidt.

 

Charles goes a bit pale. "You tortured him."

 

Erik breaks away from their shaded corner and starts to walk back to the hotel that he know knows they're staying at a couple of blocks over. He recognizes Charles, he can see that they have become somewhat allies, but all of those memories were like a story being told to him. In short, he didn't see why he had to stand there and have his methods questioned.

 

"I could have entered his mind-- I could have gotten the information without him even knowing, Erik! His mutation is the ability to create whirlwinds...did you ever think to what might have happened if he let a power loose like that in the hotel?' Charles says heatedly, following on his heels. Erik can't really figure out why he's this angry. Although that did explain why the other man was nailed to the wall.

 

"Yes, well like I said, I wasn't going to wait for you. What did you think I was going to do when I found him? Play chess and wait until you arrived?" Erik would have thought that someone who was his ally like those borrowed memories had shown would have been happy for the information.

 

"You can't just go around torturing people!' Charles yells.

 

''What exactly do you think I am, Xavier?" Erik wheels around, stopping Charles dead in his tracks. "What exactly, do you think this is? I am  _ not _ like you. I can't just take what I want from people's minds. I have to do it the old fashioned way, and that way, is what has been getting the job done for me long before I met you." he snatches the paper out of Charles' hand, shoving it back into his pocket. "I don't have the luxury of wasting time. I don't know how long I will be able to remember at a time. If I see an opportunity to get Shaw, or get information on Shaw, I am going to take it." Erik snaps. He was willing to work with Xavier but he refused to compromise on this. 

 

Charles huffs a frustrated breath, running his hand through his hair. "We are a team in this Erik. You can't just go off and do whatever you like! Is he even still alive?” Charles looks sickened and Erik turns away.

 

He had seen that look before, on Magda's face. For some reason it hurt all the more to see it on this man, directed at him.

 

"We just can't leave him up there for the hotel to find him and police to get involved." Charles finally says. “I need to know what you're doing before you do it, Erik.”

 

Erik bristles. He doesn't need a babysitter. "I'm going to do things my way. I'm just asking for you to keep up."

 

A car stops in front of them before Charles has a chance to answer, and Moira leans out the window.

 

"Get in Xavier, Romeo."

 

***

"Emma Frost has been identified at a Russian army base. It stands to reason that Shaw is with her." Moira explains as she cut through traffic on her way to the airport

 

"What are you even doing here?" Charles asks.

 

"Did you really think that they would have let you guys out with no CIA supervision?" Moira smiles

"Especially you, Xavier, can't let you out of my sight."

 

They grin at each other in what Erik considered to be a sickening display, before he clears his throat. "So Shaw is in Russia."

 

"We suspect so. We're going to meet up at the rendezvous point with the other agents and see what we can find."

 

Charles fills her in on the information that they received from Janos.

 

"We've also got a bit of a bigger problem. The information we received included XL34," Charles said in a worried tone.

 

"How would they even have known about that?"

 

"My thoughts exactly. It is possible that Emma might have siphoned the information somehow," Charles makes a frustrated noise. "I wish I could gauge some of her talent to at least see what she's capable of. I hardly had a chance to engage her on the ship before-" he glances at Erik and trails off.

 

"So whats XL34?" Erik asks.

 

Moira and Charles look at each other , having what looked to be a silent argument before Moira shrugs and turns back to the wheel, ignoring them both.

 

"I probably hadn't mentioned before, but Hank did not originally work for me." Charles started. Erik quickly sifted through his borrowed memories and saw that Hank was a rather scared looking young doctor who seemed to be Charles' assistant. He apparently had met the man, but Xavier's' memories didn't show him any specifics.

 

“He was former CIA, working with several special projects that we later discovered could be applicable to mutants. One of these projects was XL34, commonly known as Cerebro. Ironically enough, the project was originally meant to allow humans to be able to read the brainwaves of others, and interpret them as their own. A sort of home-made telepathy, if you will. Its original usage was for information gathering in the place of torture, as the range was short enough that the test subject would need to be relatively close. After I arrived, XL34 was refitted for me, as an experiment."

 

"You let the humans experiment on you." Erik repeats flatly.

 

"No. Well, yes, but it was a group experiment. We were all vested in the results." Erik doesn't say anything but the look on his face shared his opinion on that.

 

"It turns out that Xavier here pretty much created a purpose out of that ridiculously expensive waste of hardware in the end anyway, so it practically belongs to him," Moira cuts in.

 

"Well. Yes. It turns out that when attached to a telepath, it accelerates my abilities several times over what I would normally be able to accomplish."

 

Erik sat back in the car seat, trying to process this information. Charles was already incredibly powerful. A machine that would increase that power could be very dangerous...and very useful.

 

"After we discovered what Cerebro could do, the CIA turned most of the research over to us with the caveat that at a certain percentage of the people working on it had to belong to them; and that we report our findings to them occasionally. But Hank's made some great strides compared to what the first iteration was.”

 

"Why would Janos know about that?" Erik asks, trying to make the connection.

 

"It could be that he's trying to get a hold of it for himself." suggested Moira.

 

"It would make no sense. Shaw's already tried to make his move and it seems like he doesn't need Cerebro to convince political figures to do his bidding when simple money will do. And Cerebro was constructed to pattern my brainwaves. I don't think another telepath would be able to make much use of it at all in any case."

Charles explains.

 

"Well whatever the case may be, we have to account for the fact that there may be a mole in the CIA. Only several people knew about that project and it troubles me that it seems to now be common knowledge."

 

"We'll worry about it later," Erik says impatiently. "Right now whats truly important is Shaw, Frost, and whatever they're doing in Russia."

 

****

 

The flight to Russia was uneventful and they spent most of it trying to decide their game plan for confronting Schmidt.

 

Xavier had been acting strangely all throughout the plane ride, shooting him glances like he had wanted to talk to him about something, but he always seemed to bite it back.

 

After meeting with the other agents and several troops borrowed from a local army base, they had snuck onto enemy lines in a cargo truck which remained undisturbed thanks to Charles' intervention. Erik was crouched behind a barbed wire impatiently, watching the Russian guards do their rounds. He saw at least five weaknesses in their formation and for all the time they had spent sitting and quietly talking, he could have been in there already. Schmidt was once again and reach and he could FEEL it. He wanted to end this today.

 

He scans the area with his binoculars, picking out possible sources of ammunition. These humans felt so secure in their metal armor and metal weapons. Erik smiled. They would learn. It's like they were making it easy for him.

 

"Charles do you sense the other telepath or Shaw in there?" He asked.

 

Charles lifts his hand to his head and his gaze goes distant. "I don't sense either of them, but this isn't the first time that I've been blocked by Frost."

 

Looks like they were doing this the traditional way then. "Where are we attacking from?"

 

"Wait what? This is a recon mission only, Lehnsherr,” Moira hisses, pulling him back down below the cover of the shrubbery on the hill.

 

"Why? We're already here and Shaw could be inside right now" he argues, angry at this new delay. How many more will he have to endure before he's able to see Schmidt dead?

 

"Did you seriously not notice how we got here? It's not like we have permission to be on Russian ground. We don't want to cause an international incident here, the CIA can't just go bursting through a Russian army base!" she argues angrily.

 

Erik smiles at her, "Then its a good thing I'm not CIA," and with that, he launches himself over the barbed wire fence that hid their position and ran full straight on to the first weak part that he had seen in their defenses, ignoring the cries of Xavier and Moira behind him. He was fine with helping Charles with his mission as long as it aligned with his, but he wasn't going to put his revenge on hold for anyone.

 

He uses some of his rage to yank the guns out of the surprised guard's hand and dismantles it into pieces, using his momentum to savagely kick the guard in the face.

 

He's on the next one before the first one goes down, sending his knives sailing through to slice through the man in front of him, deflecting a bullet away and grinning as it found its mark in yet another guard. This time he was ready for Schmidt. He burst into the building the guards had been guarding, knife at the ready. He was so focused on his goal that he almost didn't hear Charles until he had nearly sent his knife his way.

 

"Erik!" Charles hissed. "What the hell do you think you're doing?"

 

"Getting the job done, Charles. I don't care about human territorial concerns. Shaw might be in there, and I am going to find out. Are you with me?'

 

Charles shakes his head. "Well, we've already come this far. I think the others have left us to our own fates though."

 

Erik snorts. "Humans."

 

"Are you ready?" Charles stands with his hand to his head, staring at the door ahead. "There are two people in that room and one of them is shielded. I can't read their minds from here."

 

"Frost!" Erik grins savagely and peels the hinges away, kicking the door down.

 

The Russian General was sitting down looking like he was in the middle of a serious conversation with another older man in an army uniform. They broke off, looking up in surprise, and Erik almost could have cursed. Where was Shaw?

 

"Where is Shaw?" he growled, stalking forward towards the General. The human puffed up, calling out for his guards, whom Erik had already incapacitated, and he shorts out the general's radio, to cut off any possibility of calling for further help. "I won't ask again."

 

"He doesn't know." Charles was staring at the other man in a daze.

 

"So this was a waste of time!" Erik snarls, slamming his hand on the table. He was tired of coming so close.

 

"You.." he looked back to see Charles still staring at the other man with the general, who seemed to be frozen at the end of the table. "Raven?"

 

Erik starts as the man..ripples, for lack of a better word, and resolves into a very bright, very blue, and very naked female.

 

"You always know when its me." her voice was a low, beautiful alto and she was smiling a bit crookedly.

 

Charles rushes forward and almost bowls her over. "Where have you been?" he exclaims in a choked voice.

 

"Oh you know the usual, getting captured, working for the enemy, little things,“ she grins, lifting up her arms and squeezing Charles back.

 

"How? What!" Charles looked like he wanted to ask her a million questions at once and Erik glances between the two of them before realizing that he was probably the only one still not distracted.

 

"We don't have time for this." he said again, earing a glare from Charles.

 

"Do you know where Shaw is? Is he here?" he demands. Charles sister or no, he has no idea how trustworthy she was, and if Shaw was actually in the building he wanted to be able to catch the man before he sunk back under the radar.

 

"Shaw?" Raven said in a surprised tone. "He's not in Russia. I was sent here to explain that to the general and to give my apologies."

 

"So you're working for him then."

 

At this Raven looks down and away. "It's complicated."

 

"Try me." Charles cut in, his confusion and relief quickly turning into anger. "So you just decided to fall off the face of the earth? Is he keeping you captive somehow? Why didn't you come to me for help?"

 

"Because I don't need your help, Charles!" she snaps, and this looked like the beginning of a long held argument. He can't believe he came all the way to Russia to listen to siblings spat. He slams his knife into the wall in front of the General who was attempting to take advantage of their distraction to sneak out of the door.

 

"You stay right where you are." he says in a dangerous tone. He melts the metal off the chair backs and wrapped them tightly around the arms, legs and mouth of the general, leaving him trussed up on the floor.

 

"We only have a few minutes before reinforcements arrive." Charles announces, glancing towards the door. "Raven, you come with us."

 

Raven raises her eyebrow but didn't reply, following her brother docilely. The trip back to the hideout was a lot more uneventful than the trip in, and as soon as they hit the outside air, Raven transformed back into a young man wearing a Russian military uniform.

 

Moira was hissing mad when they returned, turning her glare immediately on Erik. "Do you even understand what you've just done? Do you have any respect for how much work and effort it took for us to even get to this point? You can't just use our resources and then...fuck off and do whatever you like, Lehnsherr!"

 

"Moira." Charles tired voice cut in through her rant before Erik could angrily cut in that he wasn't sure when the humans would get it through their thick skulls that he was not CIA, and was only allied with them where it benefited him, much like they were doing for him.

 

"Who is this?" Moira questions, jerking her head towards Raven.

 

"My sister." Charles smiles. He still seemed angry, but for the most part it seemed like relief had won out in that battle.

 

The young solider ripples and transformed back into the dark blue form, causing cries of surprise and horrified flinches to most of the agents in the area.

 

"Raven Darkholme." If she noticed the reactions of the humans around her it didn't show at all.

 

"I see." Moira shoots Charles a questioning glance. "Well we haven't much time before they start combing this place for the oh so obvious trail that Lehnsherr left right back here. We'll have to be out of here in the hour."

 

It was decided that flying would have attracted too much attention so they ended up crammed in a military truck with several other agents. Erik spends most of the trip writing what he had seen on a scrap of paper that he had borrowed from one of the men. While Xavier's data drop trick was useful, it was limited and only showed him half the story. His reaction to how he had dealt with Janos was evidence enough that Charles did not share his resolve in doing whatever it took to get Schmidt.

 

The Xavier siblings were talking quietly in the corner and Erik kept on sneaking peeks at them in between writing down where they were going and where they had come from. He thought that Raven's sudden appearance in Russia was a bit too fortuitous to take at face value.

  
Why was she speaking with the Russian general? He stares at her blue form, trying to read her while she wasn't noticing. He privately admitted to himself that he also couldn't stop looking at her simply because she was flawless. Her blue skin was smooth and clashed wonderfully, and although she was naked, she sat unconcerned, completely ignoring the human men who were gaping at her in the truck. When they had gotten to the truck Charles had offered her his jacket and she had it draped loosely around her, but it did nothing to disguise how magnificent she was.

Raven looks up at him, cocking her head. "You have questions.”

 

"Several."

 

"Well shoot." she says

 

"Where is Shaw?" Erik asks bluntly.

 

"I don't know. I've never even seen the guy, I got my orders from Frost, same as the others.."

 

"So she just sent you to Russia by yourself to run an errand for her and you decided to do it out of the goodness of your heart is that it?"

 

Raven laughs bitterly. "You could call it that." She leaned her head forward onto her knees. "After I left Charles, I was...rootless to say the least. I ended up finding a group of some other mutants who were more...to my way of thinking." Erik watched as Charles grimaced, and resolved to ask him what she meant later.

 

"It was fun at first, we were living just free, completely unafraid for the first time in my life. It wasn't that I was ungrateful to you Charles, or what you did for me but I just. I can't live like that Charles." she said in almost a pleading tone.

 

"So how did you get mixed up with Shaw?" Erik asks, unwilling to get distracted from this line of questioning.

 

"I was introduced to the Hellfire club by an friend of mine, Angel. She was working at the main club then, and knew a man who didn't care if you were a mutant, encouraged it in fact. I spoke with Frost and it turns out he wanted a shape shifter for some of his smaller demonstrations," she shrugs, "She had me impersonate people to allow us access into places where we wouldn't, a little civil disobedience. Apparently Shaw had access to celebrities, politicians...people of importance, and he was willing to fight, actually fight for our ability to walk outside in the sun fearless. It was what I wanted to hear at the time."

 

Charles was silent, his face pale as Raven continued.

 

"I didn't find out about what else Shaw was doing until I had been with Frost for several months. We didn't actually see him, we were just given our marching orders and then we'd see results. But then people started dying. You have to understand I wanted the humans to understand what we were going through. To make them see their own bigotry and how it hurt us. But I didn't want to kill them. By the time I realized that I was already in pretty deep. I was the only shape shifter, and I was deemed 'too useful' to be allowed to just leave. So, one day I had a meeting with him and Emma, oh, she's a telepath like you Charles."

 

"And then?" Erik prompted.

 

"Right. Well I was given an ultimatum. I was too useful to be let go, so I could either continue my current role, or..she would kill me. And not only that, she knew about you Charles. She knew everything about you, your research, Hank, everything. He..implied that you and the home might not survive my defection either."

 

"Oh Raven." Charles started, sighing. "You should have come to me. I can take care of myself."

 

"Yeah well, so can I Charles. I had gotten myself into that situation and I was going to get myself out of it. I can't just keep running to you everytime I needed help. Plus you don't know how far Shaw's reach is. Hell, just having Emma makes him virtually unstoppable and nobody knows how he controls her. Theres no secret that I can keep from her for long. The most I could do was use some of the shielding tricks that you taught me."

 

"Ah, so thats why I didn't sense you in the building." Charles exclaims, "I was wondering about that. You've become quite skilled. "

 

"Yeah. It stands up to any rudimentary sweeps, or so I've learned from hiding from Frost. But now that I'm captured, I don't know if they will see that as a defection. I can't stay here. I have other people be in danger for my own mistakes, Charles." she lowered her head.

 

This was all well and good but- "So you don't have any information as to where Shaw might be next?"

 

She looked up at him, her bright yellow eyes glowing faintly. "No, I wasn't privy to that information. But if what Charles told me is true, it sounds like he's planning something a bit larger than the usual. I wasn't even told what the plan was for coming to Russia." She said, sounding frustrated.

 

"Well its not as if are going to let you go back, Raven." Charles said in a steely tone. "We just have to tell Hank to warn the others."

 

Erik curses. Useless. The most they could go off was the information that he had gotten from Janos, and most of that had pointed straight to Russia. So it stood to reason that either Janos had given him incorrect information or the more likely answer, especially taking Raven's story into consideration, that Shaw simply didn't tell the whole of his plans to his subordinates.

 

Emma Frost seemed to be the key to this. If they could find her, they could probably crack the entire organization. Shaw had to trust somebody.

 

Charles had his arm around Raven, comforting her softly while simultaneously chiding her for not contacting him anyway, and Erik wondered if he could see just how defensive her pose whenever she spoke to him. He supposed it wasn't any of his business.

 

Finishing up his writing, he slips the paper into his pocket and leans his head against the convoy. It was going to be a long ride back to base.

 

Once they had arrived back in Virginia, they walked straight into chaos.


	7. Chapter 7

The building was almost completely destroyed. Men were on the floor dying, and Erik stumbled a bit on the blood slicked floor, trying to make sense of what he was seeing.

 

A tall brunette was screaming at him, pulling at his arm, but he pushes her away, walking further into the building. Schmidt had been here. He had been here. It always seemed like he was one step away from the man. Where was he? He was looking for someone, but he couldn't remember who.

 

He coughs, the dust filled air making it hard to breathe. Were they still under attack? There was no screaming, just the moaning sounds of agents bleeding out on the floor with what looked like wounds inflicted with a small sword. He opens his mouth to call out before he pauses. He has no idea who he was calling out for, but he needed to find him.

 

"Erik!" a dark haired man came limping out of the rubble, leaning against the wall for support. Erik felt himself sag with relief. "Charles." he said, surprising himself. "Come on, we've got to get out of here."

 

He half dragged, half walked Charles outside of the building, where there was a small crowd of uniformed men huddled together, presumably the survivors.

 

The same brunette who had screamed at him earlier came rushing up to them, taking Charles arm out from under Erik's and guiding him to the stretcher that had set up in the corner. "You're hurt!"

 

"It's just a scratch." Charles grimaces, "It looks a lot worse than it is. Got hit by some flying rock. How many?"

 

The brunette looked grim, shaking her head. "More dead than not. We were defenseless out here, didn't even see him coming. The reports I'm getting from the men involve some strange stories, but most of them collaborate on the the fact that there was a red mutant here who apparently had the ability to teleport. He was accompanied by Shaw and another unidentified mutant with flight abilities. The red mutant was able to teleport in the explosives without the bomb alarm going off in time. So far we don't know what their initial target was but.." she hesitates and Charles visibly stiffens.

 

"Where's Raven?"

 

"Charles-"

 

"Where. is. Raven?" Charles asks again, his tone steely. "Tell me."

 

"She was taken Charles. Numerous agents saw her being teleported away by the red mutant."

 

Charles closed his eyes with a pained look on his face. "I need to get in contact with Hank."

 

"There's something else, Charles."

 

Charles laughs humorlessly as the medics came forward to bandage his leg. "What else?"

 

"Components of the XL34 prototype were also taken."

 

" _ What?" _

 

_ " _ A number of the scientists we had working on the project have been taken, as well as the headpiece and what few documentation we had here of it. It looks like that was one of their objectives.

 

Erik looked on at their conversation, confused. He didn't know what an XL34 was, but all he needed to know that Schmidt was here, and he was working with other people...like him. He pats himself down to see if he had left a note of some kind, but came up with nothing.

 

Charles looked up at him. "It must've fallen out in the blast, or the confusion after, Erik. I'll fill you in in a moment."

 

Erik didn't know what that meant but seeing the telepath look so small and diminished on the gurney was making him grit his teeth. "So what now?" he asked, not wanting to broadcast his ignorance to the other uniformed men standing around.

 

"First I need to make a call to Hank and make sure he is safe."

 

Hank? Erik thought, bewildered.

 

"And then we are going to find Raven. Schmidt cannot have her. I didn't get her back to lose her so quickly." Charles' voice was like stone, and his eyes were flashing. In that moment, he was a bit terrifying. Erik looks away.

 

"We're going to Hellfire."

 

It was later determined that Shaw had deliberately used the blast to amplify the amount of fear and noise that would be in the air, in case that Xavier had been at the base. It was just their good luck, or bad luck, as Erik privately saw it, that they had just arrived on base and wasn't there for the initial attack, and when the bomb was detonated, they were still sufficiently far from the main section of the compound so as to be unharmed.

 

Moira decides to stay behind for now, promising to meet up with them in Las Vegas later. "There's too much chaos and cleanup here to do for me to go haring off to Hellfire right now. Plus, theres no guarantee that Shaw will be there, you do realize this."

 

"He'll be there." Charles said in a grim tone.

 

****

Later that night, Erik sits against the balcony in the motel room that they had rented, running his hand over the knife that he had found in his bags and watching Xavier. The telepath had been quiet all night and Erik wanted to say something to him, but was loathe to intrude. The room was small and cramped, with two tiny beds and a small table that had an imprinted chess set that Xavier had rather optimistically set up and then summarily lost interest in.

 

"I'm sure she'll be OK," he tries, immediately feeling like an idiot. He had no idea if Raven Darkholme would be alright but from what he had seen of her, if she could survive in Schmidt and Frost's grip for so long then she looked like she could take care of herself.

 

"It's more Shaw I'm worried about." Charles weakly jokes, but it falls flat. The warm summer air had made the night balmy and he had shed his usual layers in favor of a dress shirt with rolled up sleeves and slacks. "I know she's an adult now." he continues quietly. "But I still see her as my little sister, you know?"

 

Erik did not in fact know, seeing as he'd never had any siblings, but he keeps quiet, letting Xavier talk.

 

“She was my best friend, but sometimes it seemed like we never truly understood each other.. We grew up together...I knew her mind like my own. She never seemed to understand that I didn't see her face, it didn't matter to me how she looked or what clothing she wore or didn't wear." Charles picks up one of the small chess pieces\, turning it over in his hand. "It only mattered to me that we were family. And that we would protect each other, no matter what." He laughed bitterly. "Later, of course, she called me naive. Said my privilege blinded me to the truth. Blocked me from her mind. I can't help but think that maybe if I had just...done more. Said something different, then she wouldn't have left.”

 

Erik looks down at the now sharpened knife in his lap. "It seems to me like someone like her wouldn't be able to hide who she was for long."

 

"I never asked her to hide who she was!" Charles exclaimed vehemently. "I just wanted her to-" he sighs, sinking his head into his hands. "I just wanted her to be safe."

 

"Safe from the humans." Erik repeated. "I don't blame her for wanting to fight back, Charles."

 

“We were fighting back...I thought that she understood what I was trying to do for the future of mutants everywhere. A peaceful integration. That was our dream.”

 

Erik thinks of the men he had seen being docilely led to the slaughterhouse by men in uniforms. "Sometimes there is no peaceful solution."

 

"Yes well excuse me if I'd not like my baby sister to become some sort of revenge crazed vigilante.' Charles snaps, and then immediately looks contrite. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry." He gets up from his place at the table and walks over to sit next to Erik at the balcony.

 

"I keep talking about my own problems...I know your focus is on Shaw. Have you given any thought to what your plans are after we beat Shaw?

 

Erik straightens. "I"m not going to beat Shaw. I'm going to kill him."

 

Charles goes silent for a while. "Killing Shaw is not going to bring back your memory." he says finally.

 

Erik scoffs. Does Charles think he doesn't know that? "Of course it won't. It wont bring back my mother either, or the rest of the people he murdered. Killing Shaw won't make one whit of a difference in the world to anyone else but me, knowing that that murderer is in the grave." There was no other option for him.

 

"And after?"

 

Erik blinked. "What about it?" He'd always just assumed that there wouldn't be an after. Schmidt had been the final result, the end of all of his goals.

 

"Yes, after. What are you planning on doing then?"

 

"I've never thought about it. Does it really matter?"

 

"You can't just live your life solely on revenge, Erik, you have to have a goal past murder."

 

Erik was getting a little tired of Charles telling him what his goals should be. "If you knew what he'd done you would not say these things to me." he turns his face away from Charles, only for the other man to grip his chin and turn it back towards him.

 

"I know what he's done."

 

Charles eyes were solemn and the touch of his hand sent little tingles down the back of Erik's spine. "I've seen what he's done in your mind, Erik. I've seen what you've been through."

 

"Then you should know why I have to kill him." he responds, unable to look away.

 

Charles closes his eyes. "I think you're better than that, Erik."

 

Erik laughs. "Then you really don't know me at all. I barely have a life as it is Charles. How long did you think I was going to survive like this, wandering from day to day, barely knowing what the hell is going on at any given time? Waking up having no idea who I'm looking at, who I"m talking to, if I like a person, if a person is my enemy. I live my life off notes, Charles. Fucking notes. You don't find anything sad about that?"

 

"And after you've killed Shaw, will that somehow make all of that better?"

 

"No. But it will have made all of it worth it." he replies grimly.

 

Charles has no answer to that and drops his hand from Erik's chin. "I'm still not sure why you always remember me," he says.

 

"Beats me. I remember Frost too, at least her face. I thought it was a telepath thing."

 

"Hmm." Charles sounds thoughtful but doesn't continue down that line of conversation.

 

"So what about you?" Erik asks. "What's your big plan for 'after', after you get Raven back and Shaw is defeated?”

 

"I...had thoughts of opening up a school." Charles said, folding his hands together and leaning back on them. The pose made him look younger than he was, moonlight spilling over his skin.

 

"I should've known. What your very own Harvard?" Erik jokes, but Charles shakes his head smiling as if this was a great secret.

 

"For mutants only, Erik. I've been thinking...those other mutants Raven had been mentioning who got mixed up with Shaw. How many of them were just kids confused at what their powers mean and the humans' reception to them? How much more acceptance in society could we get if the humans could see what we do and understand that we are the same species, whether one person can...jump higher, or fly, or..I don't know, control metal and magnetism."

 

Erik smiles up at the night sky. A lofty goal, but even though he knew so little of this man, it just seemed so..Charles. "I don't know if integration would quite be that easy."

 

"But it would be a start! If I could find them when they're young and take them in so that they can know that they are not alone, that there are tens of thousands of other mutants out there, that they wouldn't be victimized by their parents, or taken advantage of by monsters like Shaw." Charles speaks with passion, his eyes shining in the night air.

 

When Charles said it, Erik could see the future that Charles would build. He could see his future rewritten where his mutation made him just a normal human being who could move metal instead of what the humans considered a freak. He could also see what would more likely happen.

 

"After I left the camps, I thought I could live a normal life." Erik starts, feeling Charles go still and attentive next to him. "I just...wouldn't use my powers, I thought. Live like a regular human. Defy what Schmidt had tried to hammer into me. I had a girl, one who knew what I could do and who I thought didn't mind. She was a human, and we were both very young and very stupid."

 

The memory had to have been years ago but it still seems fresh in his mind. "She would encourage me to hide myself from the other humans, to not let them know what I could do, and I agreed. Thought it felt like losing a limb, I agreed and lived with her in the hope of having a better life. It became our little secret."

 

He looks down at his hands, remembering Magda's face, her look of fear whenever she saw him using his powers. "We had been living together for some time when I saw a couple of humans, boys really, but I was a boy myself at the time, harassing her down by the river. I jumped to defend her-- but they were determined. One of them picked up a metal pipe and hit her. I saw her go down and I..I lost it. I used my power, I didn't kill them. But they were hurt very badly. When I went over to Magda she pushed me away. She was horrified that I used my power in front of anyone, even to save her own life."

 

"I realize now that she would have never accepted who I was. She wanted a "cleansed" version of me, not my true mutant self. Word got out from the boys that I had beaten that I was a freak of nature, and the townspeople tried to run me out. I looked to her, ready to run away with her, start anew somewhere else...and she was part of the mob. Just the same as any other human. They are always afraid of what they cannot understand or possess."

 

Charles is silent for a while after he finishes before he shifts closer to Erik, looking up into his eyes with a serious expression on his face.

 

"She was an idiot."

 

Erik laughs, some of the bitterness dispersed.

 

"No seriously, Erik, she was a complete idiot. If she could see what I see and then give that up for any reason...there's no hope for her."

 

Erik leaned back, still amused. The memory of Magda's desertion still hurt but he wished he would be able to remember Charles' response to it later.

 

"And what do you see?" he asks.

 

He's surprised when Xavier lifts himself up onto his knees and frames Erik's face with his hands. "I see someone strong enough to fight even when they aren't sure of themselves. I see someone who is not afraid to do what he needs to do to survive. I see someone who is hurting and has been hurt. But most of all, I see the potential for such greatness that its dazzling."

 

Charles eyelashes were very long from this distance, and Erik feels his lips part. "Are you sure you're not nearsighted?"

 

"Quiet, Lehnsherr," he laughs. There's a moment where Erik thinks that he's going to kiss him, but Charles pulls away, a troubled expression on his face.

 

"We've done this before." he says, and Charles starts, staring at Erik with some surprise. "You remember?"

 

"No." Erik admits, "But your memories included snippets of several midnight conversations that included a bed. And if my past self was anything like myself now, then I would already be kissing you."

 

Charles face turns suddenly serious. "I didn't want to make it seem like I was pressuring you. I know you don't remember...anything about me really, besides what I've effectively told you and I don't want you to think that you have to-"

 

He cuts off as Erik tugs the other man forward and silences him with a kiss. "Mmph-" Erik flips the other man over, starting in on his buttons and Charles covers his hand with his own 'Erik! You stopped me...before. When we did this. I said I wouldn't read your mind without permission, so I don't know why. “

 

Erik pauses and looks down at the man lying on the floor underneath him. He might not remember anything, and even less than he suspected, due to Charles' apparent editing- but he knew that he wanted to have this remarkable man right now, just as he remembers him currently. "I won't remember this tomorrow."

 

"I know." Charles says, an unhappy look twisting onto his face.

 

"But if there's one thing I've come to realize, is that living for the moment has its own perks." he grinned down at the other man and leans back down to lick a long line down that tempting neck. He didn't know if it was because of all the death he had seen today, or the conversation aftewards, he just knew that he wanted this man and he wasn't willing to waste this chance like he had apparently done last time.

 

"Are you sure? We don't have to...oh," Charles gasps, tearing at Erik's shirt greedily.

 

"If I forget tomorrow, you'll just have to remind me." Erik's eyes go dark as he let his hands slide down Charles' side to cup his behind. "Believe me, I won't mind."


	8. Chapter 8

The Hellfire club is overly opulent, gaudy and almost insultingly easy to sneak into. 

 

Erik hasn't encountered a single guard on his way in and wonders, not for the first time, if Charles hadn't missed something when explaining the plan to him again this morning. He had been lax on keeping a record of what was going on...having a telepath around was too easy. Erik takes his mind off of Charles and tries to focus on Schmidt. He needs his anger if he's going to avoid a repeat of his earlier failure. 

 

Moira and her agents are allegedly on standby, but Erik had seen their faces when the situation was briefed. He wasn't too confident in their motivation to come running to the rescue of a mutant. 

 

He barely pays attention to the dancers grinding on poles on the stage, keeping his eyes on the curtain leading to the door in the back.

 

"Well is she here?"

 

Charles nods grimly. "She's definitely here, but I don't think she's noticed me yet. I see you're using your techniques that I taught you.”

 

Erik wasn't taking any chances. "What about Shaw?"

 

"I can't sense him, but I never could. He must have some way of blocking me," Charles replies, frustrated. Erik doubts that the owner is here with this level of security, but he he puts his guard up anyway, eyes scanning faces throughout the club. This could be a trap. 

 

"With this amount of people and um...energy, its probably going to be harder for her to pick you out of the crowd in any case." Charles is looking a little sweaty, and Erik grins at him, waggling his eyebrows.

 

"Oh shut up, some feelings you just don't want to have to experience secondhand. Plus the dichotomy of what the dancers are thinking in contrast what the men are thinking in here is giving me a headache." Charles grumbles. 

 

There was supposed to be a big act that was going on at midnight and they had decided to wait until then, as thats when the energy of the crowd would be the most distracting to Frost, as well as to any guards that might sitting around. As soon as the lights went dim, they make their way across the floor and slip through the curtain in the back.

 

"Our intel tells us that the office down here is somewhat of a decoy, the real offices are on the second floor." Charles whispers, jogging quickly ahead to scout the way. "Quickly, while the coast is clear."

 

They hurry up the staircase, only having one quick call which they encountered a guard that Charles had warned about a second too late. Said guard was currently gagged with his own tie, and hanging feet first from the central railing. "Lets move on." Erik says grimly. 

 

“It may be possible that Frost was not expecting us to make our move quite so quickly.” Charles whispers. It would certainly explain the lack of security. 

 

They find Emma Frost in what looks like a rather large bedroom, sitting at a crystalline desk. She's flipping through several files. But as they approach, Charles suddenly cries out in pain, holding his hand to his head.

 

"You boys will have to do better than that." Quick as a snake, she turns and hurls the knife that she was hiding underneath the folder straight at Erik.

 

He deflects it without thinking, leaping over the desk and attempting to tackle her, but she turns crystalline and her fist connects right into his chest.

 

It feels like a wrecking ball had crashed into his body and he staggers, trying to find room to breathe. Emma turns away, darting quickly towards what looked like an exit in the back of the room, but she's blocked by Charles, who had seemingly recovered while she was fighting Erik, He had his hand to his head and a determined look on her face but Emma smirks.

 

"There's nothing even you can do while I'm like this, honey," She gestures to her body. "Why don't you boys just give..up!" Circling Charles, she runs to the window, ready to jump out through the fire escape on the edge.

 

But Erik was ready for her.

 

He ripped the metal off the top safety bar of the fire escape and sent it flying towards Emma. She cries out in fear and pain as he wraps them savagely around her wrists and neck, forcing her towards the ground and her neck back at a painful angle.

 

He keeps the metal flexible, yet strong enough to not allow her to escape and looks over to Charles.

 

"Can you break through her defenses?"

 

Charles shakes his head, still pale from whatever Emma had done when they first walked into the room. "She's right, I can't attack her while she is in that form."

 

"Well then we'll just have to find her shatter point." Erik says calmly, ignoring the flash of fear that runs over Emma's face

 

"You think you can-" she starts, only to be cut off as Erik cuts off her breathing by tightening the metal around her neck. 

 

"Erik." Charles warns.

 

It was different from choking flesh and blood. Erik focused solely on the metallic alloy, keeping it malleable enough to bend, yet hard enough to squeeze into her hard throat. The thing about diamonds, he idly thought, was that there were so many myths on whether diamond could break. The stone was actually quite easy to shatter as long as you put in the right amount of force in the right place. Erik savagely wrenches the metal closer together, smiling as cracks started to form on her neck.

 

"Erik!"

 

He could kill her right now. It would be so easy, and it would be one less person in the way between him and Schmidt. He smiles at the fear he can see in her eyes, tightening the metal a bit more. Her neck is starting to make a high pitched tinkling sound, its so close to its breaking point. 

 

"Erik, thats enough!" Charles yells, breaking his concentration.

 

At the same time, Emma suddenly turns to flesh and bone, gasping for breath, and Erik loosens the metal while still keeping it around her neck. 

 

"Charles" he says urgently, and the other telepath steps up, hand once again going to his head.

 

Erik has no doubt that what follows is a battle of sorts, but to him it just looked like the room went eerily silent and still. Emma slumps over soon though, closing her eyes in defeat and Erik releases the breath he was holding. 

 

"You're talented, but I'm stronger than you." Charles murmurs, eyes still distant. 

 

Erik looks around impatiently. He had made a lot of noise with that trick with the fire escape and he's not sure if any one heard it downstairs. Nothing would be more inconvenient than spending the night having to run from cops. "What have you found?" He tightens the metal around her neck again and Emma grimaces, twisting as if to to try and get away from Charles. 

 

"Nothing good. I'm afraid we don't have much time either. Shaw's plan is monstrous.”

 

Emma looks up, her prideful face eyeing them with disdain. "You're too late anyway, telepath. The humans will do our work for us."

 

"What is she talking about?" Erik asks curtly

 

"Courting those politicians...that missing Colonel...they're planning on starting a war!" Charles said, horrified.

 

"A cleanse." Emma corrected. "A new world, safe for mutants. A war would imply that there was going to be a fight of some kind on our part." Her smile was cold like ice as she turned to Erik. "And you, Lehnsherr, you're looking quite pathetic. I'm amazed you even got this far, considering."

 

Erik stays silent, ready for any trick that she might be considering. He doesn't know what she's referring to, but Charles has suddenly gone rigid with shock next to him.

 

"Where is Shaw?" He asks, uninterested in her tricks.

 

Her eyes open wide, genuinely surprised. "Where is.."

 

She suddenly slumps over, shaking. At first Erik thinks she's having some kind of a fit when he suddenly realizes that she's laughing. Laughing!

 

"You're joking. You're fucking kidding me." Emma's laugher rang out pure and cold. "Erik...you fucking idiot."

 

Erik flushes, ready to shake some answers out of her if she wasn't willing to say

 

"Sebastian Shaw is already dead. You killed him!”

 

It was if all the air had been sucked out of the room in that one moment.

 

"Have you seriously been chasing the ghost of someone you've already defeated?" she laughs again, genuinely amused.

 

He had been shaking his head before he realized he was doing it. No. She was lying. She had to be, it made no sense. The clues, everything, pointed to Sebastian Shaw. He would have remembered. He would have remembered that! This was just another telepath trick.

 

"Shut up!" he growls, shaking her by the neck until she stopped laughing. 

 

"I am all that is left of Sebastian Shaw. And the two of you are very much too late to do anything about what is coming."

 

Erik can barely breathe. He feels Charles cry out, barely feels the hands on his body that were holding him back. 

He doesn't want to look at Charles to see his face. 

 

"Erik...she's right. We don't have time for this. We've got to go. Now. We can take her with us as a prisoner, but we have to leave now," Charles says urgently.

 

The door opened and Moira and her agents burst in, fanning around the room and surrounding Emma.

 

"Moira!" Charles exclaims. "We know what they're planning. We have to get to Washington, fast. She's been having Raven impersonate Colonel Hendry. The real Colonel is already dead. 

 

"What?" 

 

"She's orchestrated this entire thing. The Russians will meet with the President as a last ditch effort to prevent World War III, thanks to the missiles that were scheduled to be placed in Turkey. She's going to force Raven as Col Hendry to attack the Russian delegation.”

 

Moira looks horrified. "You're joking."

 

"I wish I was." 

 

Moira presses a hand to her forehead as if she has a headache. "Do you have her neutralized?"

 

Charles glanced back at Emma who was bent over in an awkward position looking perfectly calm. 

 

"Yes, but I won't be able to shield her indefinitely. It's best we-"

 

Erik suddenly snatches one of the guns from the agent closest to Moira's belt, spins around and slams the butt against Emma's skull. She slumps over unconscious, and he loosens the metal restraint around her neck and refits it around her arms and legs.

 

"That...could be a solution." Moira said, eyebrows raised. "Good thinking, Romeo."

 

Erik barely hears her. It's impossible that he had already killed Shaw. He would have remembered. He finds himself unwilling to look at Xavier for fear of seeing something on his face that he didn't want to see. 

 

"We can have a flight taking us out to DC in an hour," Moira was saying. "It will take us around 5 hours to get there, and I can petition to double the guard around the summit. Charles. Do you think your sister will do it?"

 

"She won't have a choice. Emma has already implanted her suggestions," Charles says grimly "I can probably take them off but I will need to get close to her."

 

"Right. Lets move then. Erik, are you alright?"

 

He had been standing there, staring at the fallen body of Emma, their conversation washing over him. He would have remembered. It had to be a trick to weaken his resolve. If Shaw thought that he could mess with Erik's mind yet again then he had another think coming. 

 

"I'm fine."

 

****

 

It doesn't take them a long time to get to Washington. 

 

"We have to be careful," Moira was saying, leaning against the library table. "If we let out that we know that Col. Hendry is the compromised one, she may have further instructions to turn into someone else, and then we won't know who."

 

"Couldn't we just tell them and get it canceled?" Erik asks, turning over the photograph he had of Emma. On the back of it he had written 'Enemy: Not to be trusted'.

 

"I wish," Moira said in a frustrated tone. "Unfortunately I don't have anything near that amount of clout, and my superiors don't want it getting out that you guys exist, no offense."

 

Erik laughs humorlessly. "Keeping the "freaks" a secret."

 

"Erik," Charles says quietly, and he subsides, shoving the photograph of Emma into his pocket. He had decided that nothing Emma said could be trusted, and that Schmidt was probably behind this entire attempt. He had to believe it. They would go to the summit, stop Charles' sister, and Shaw would be there. He had to be. 

 

Moira takes one look at Erik's face and then turns to Charles, having a silent conversation. "I'll be back later." She said, giving Charles a raised eyebrow.

 

The door closes behind her and they were alone. Charles gets up and sits down next to Erik.

 

"Erik-"

 

"She's lying, Charles."

 

“Erik."

 

"She's lying." Erik knew she was lying. He would have remembered. 

 

Charles looks down, seemingly hesitant to broach this topic. "A while ago, you said you would allow me to try and see if I could heal you.”

 

Erik closes his eyes, "And if it doesn't work? Am I to live off of your memories for the rest of my life?"

 

There was silence, and Erik opens his eyes. Charles had a strange look on his face, and Erik replayed his last words over in his head.

 

The rest of his life. He hadn't really thought of what Charles was going to do after he had his sister back. Erik still had to kill Schmidt of course, but once Charles had Raven back he had no real reason to follow Erik around anymore. The thought was a bitter one. 

 

"You could stay with me." 

 

Charles is looking at him with earnest eyes. "Afterwards. Even if it doesn't work."

 

Erik snorts. "Doing what?"

 

"Anything!" Charles says. "You could...teach or do something else...something you wanted."

 

Erik turns to Charles, eyes serious. "I will let you try. But I haven't allowed myself to think of what would happen tomorrow. There is no tomorrow, there is only today, over and over for me. I've accepted that part of me. I don't want to stay and be a burden on you."

 

"You could never be a burden Erik. I just found you. I'm not going to let you go quite that easily," he said, a determined look on his face.

 

"Charles," he repeats, staring into his blue eyes. "She's lying," he says, more a plea than anything else. Charles had to believe him. 

 

Charles takes a deep breath and closes his eyes, doesn't answer. "Let me try."

 

Erik nods silently. Charles hadn't answered his question but he didn't think he could stand to hear anything else from the telepath in terms of what he read in Emma's mind. The other man stood, cradling Erik's head in his hands.

 

Erik waited for the same cold invasive feeling that he had felt when Emma had forced her way into his mind, but instead he only felt a warm pressure. Almost like the feeling of stepping into a warm blanket. He felt flashes of his darker, deeper memories flash by. A glimpse of his mother's smile, the way the warm candlelight felt on his face during his first Hanukkah. The feeling of being swung on his fathers shoulder when he was younger, the rough scrape of his beard. He didn't think he remembered that. He opened his eyes to see Charles leaning over him, hair almost touching his forehead. 

 

_Your memories are beautiful_

 

The voice curled around his conscious, feeling all the more intimate now that they were connected mentally in this way. He could feel Charles turn his attention to the darker memories that lay in the forefront of his mind, the sound of the gunshot that reverberated around the room and his mother's pained gasp. He remembered that night after he had been chased down by the humans, how he had decided that he wasn't fit to live a normal life. He would find the man that had taken his family away from him and he wouldn't stop until either he or Erik was dead.

 

Erik could feel Charles sympathy, and normally he would recoil from pity, but he could also feel the depth of the man's respect for him, and the genuineness of his emotions.

 

Charles face was wet and he sank his hands into Erik's hair.

 

"You've been through so much." The sheer depth of his emotion running through him floored Erik and he tentatively lifted his hands up to the telepath's waist as the memories streamed by him like a slideshow made of light.

 

"What's it like?" he murmured, resting his head against Charles' stomach.

 

"This is more than a block. She's completely destroyed the link between your current memories and your previous."

 

"Can you rebuild that link?"

 

"I can try. Here let me-"

 

The world around them dropped away and he was sitting across from the telepath in the garden behind his old family home. There was a wooden desk in-between them with a puzzle on it that had a pattern that was faintly familiar to Erik.

 

"What is this?" Erik looks around, puzzled and a little panicked. He hadn't expected Charles' power to extend quite  _ this  _ far.

 

"It's hard to explain, but you could consider this a part of your mind. It's alright, its just an illusion. I pulled it from one of your strongest memories. We're still physically in the library," Charles explained. 

 

Erik glanced around the room in awe. Every single bit of detail was correct down to the last book on the shelves. He ran his hands over the wooden table and felt the grain of the wood, almost exactly like he had remembered it. "This is amazing."

 

"This is all you. Everything that I can do here is pulled from your old memories. If you didn't have such a remarkable eye for detail I would have had to make up quite a lot, actually," Xavier admits.

 

Erik's attention is drawn to the broken puzzle on the table in front of them. "I don't remember having this as a child."

 

"This was my own addition. It's a representation of your memories. It's easier to view this way," Charles explains, hands curled around the puzzle gently.

 

About midway through the completion of the puzzle, a large section had been burned away, the pieces made twisted and unformed before continuing in a cohesive pattern. 

 

"Normally, a person's memories would be like this puzzle but complete up to a certain point. New memories are made and are added to the puzzle onto the end."

 

Erik tilts his head, looking down at the puzzle. He couldn't see any new pieces forming but it seemed like every time he blinked the pattern had changed slightly. 

 

Charles points to the burned portion. "If I wanted to take your memories away, I could just take a piece out of the puzzle," he mimed taking a piece out "and replace it with a similarly shaped piece of my own making. Or just leave it blank, and the human mind will fill it with a piece of its own soon enough. The main thing is, the connections are all still there. What Frost has done...she's completely damaged the connections between what you remember then and what you remember now."

 

Erik stares down at the burned and broken pieces marring the center of the puzzle.

 

"Can't you replace the pieces? Take them out or something...replace them with something else?" he asks, trying to make sense of the situation.

 

"I don't know..I've never tried that before, and If i take them out the way they are now..." Charles pulled on one of the burned pieces, and it snagged on one of the whole pieces above it, ripping a section off . "-it will damage more of your memories. With so much of your memory damaged, It would be very easy to turn your retrograde amnesia into complete amnesia."

 

Complete amnesia. The thought scared him more than he could adequately articulate. "I can't chance it until Shaw is dead."

 

Charles hesitated over the pieces, looking like he wanted to say something and then changes his mind. Erik finds himself back inside the library, arms gripping Charles dress shirt. 

 

"I'm going to try to reshape the connections now. It won't be as effective as replacing the pieces but it will be worth a try."

 

Erik steels himself and he waits to feel pain..something.

 

Nothing happens for long moments and he looks up at Charles' face, his eyes still closed and concentrating. After a long moment Charles slumps over, boneless and defeated.

 

Erik doesn't feel any different, but he's afraid to ask.

 

"Stay with me after Erik." Charles leans down to kiss Erik's forehead, "no matter what happens tomorrow."

 

Erik tightens his grip but doesn't reply. He can't make that promise. 

 

  



	9. Chapter 9

Moira outfits them in tuxedos and new pistols in the morning. Erik had woken up fully cognizant of what had happened the night before. They had gone to bed in their respective bedrooms, and Erik had lie in bed long after midnight, turning what had happened over in his mind.

 

Donning the tuxedo, Erik declines the pistol, but takes the ammunition, tucking it into his inner jacket pocket. 

 

"You know how to use one of these?" he asks Charles, holding out the gun to him. 

 

"I'm not really a gun person," Charles eyes the gun dubiously, but takes the pistol anyway. "I've never had much use for them."

 

Erik doesn't ask if he meant that he just didn't get into many fights or if he meant that with his power, he didn't really feel the need to use the pistol.

 

"If a bad guy comes near you, just point and press the trigger," Erik says, smiling.

 

Charles tucks his gun away into the jacket holster before buttoning up his tuxedo jacket. "Thanks, I'll keep that in mind," he says wryly.

 

Charles looks like he was born to wear a tuxedo, and Erik feels his mouth go dry as the dark haired man turns to him with a bright smile. 

 

"How do I look?"

 

Erik clears his throat, acutely aware of their lack of privacy. "Um..fine."

 

Charles smile turned wicked and he starts in closer to Erik, but then jumps back as Moira pokes her head into the room.

 

"You two decent? Good."

 

She tosses two pairs of earpieces to Charles and Erik. "So we can keep in contact. Charles, I know you don't need them, but to be frank, some of the men are still a bit uncomfortable with the thought of communicating telepathically."

 

Charles' expression doesn't change, seemingly used to this kind of treatment, and he picks up the earpiece, fitting it into his ear.

 

"For this we're asking-listen up, Romeo-we're asking that you stand down and wait for our men's signal to convene on Colonel Hendry. If word gets out that Hendry was even TRYING to assault anyone in Khrushchev's camp, it will cause an international incident. we go in, Charles identifies Raven, we retrieve her as peacefully as possible, and get the hell out of there," Moira says, staring hard at Erik as if she were trying to burn her words into him.

 

"Emma is still on ice, I'm assuming," he questions.

 

"Positively freezing. We're pumping her full of drugs back at the base. She won't be going anywhere anytime soon."

 

"We can't keep her unconscious forever, so the faster we figure out what's going on here, the faster we can figure out what to do with her."

 

"I'm ready." Erik puts his earpiece in his ear and tries to ready his mind. It would be over tonight, one way or another. Despite what Moira said, when he saw Schmidt, all bets were off. 

 

****

 

The building was crawling with security, thanks to Moira's timely warning, and "Col Hendry" has yet to be spotted, although the other politicians including the President had already been spotted and declared secure. 

 

"Do you sense her at all?" Moira asked, adjusting the jacket on her conservative suit.

 

Charles shook his head. "No. She's not here yet."

 

"Can you read her in all of this noise?" 

 

Charles nods distractedly. "She can shield me out somewhat, and I'd rather not have to break her defenses too hard." 

 

"If anything goes wrong, if you see anyone who doesn't seem right to you, do not hesitate to shoot." Erik says calmly. "Let me know immediately once you sense Shaw."

 

They enter the summit but keep to the back, trying to keep their eyes out for any anomalies.

 

Erik feels himself humming with adrenaline for the entire meeting. Having Charles next to him was a bit of a distraction. He had already saw that what Charles had done last night hadn't worked, and he didn't know what that meant for him. Didn't know what it meant for him and Charles.

 

He didn't want to think about it right now. Right now he had Shaw to worry about. He looks hard across the room, inspecting every official that came in through the doors, but he wasn't sure how he was supposed to tell which one was Raven. She was supposed to be Col Hendry, but it appeared as if the col wasn't in attendance today. Erik walked through the crowd, murmuring to Moira as he passed her by "Col Hendry doesn't seem to be in attendance."

 

Moira glanced around casually, but he could see the worry on her face. "Do you think Charles might have been wrong about the information?"

 

Erik shrugs, keeping his eyes out for Shaw. "I don't know but I don't see Shaw either."

 

Moira frowned. "Don't you find this at all suspicious? I see his hand in everything, but nobody's actually seen the guy since this investigation started."

 

"Shaw has always worked from the shadows." Erik said absently, a passing Russian aide catching his eye. He had tripped on the rug a bit but had caught his balance well. A little too well? Charles had mentioned that Raven was very graceful, even when in other forms.

 

They quieted down as the meeting started to begin, when Erik caught a flash of movement out of the corner of his eye. Charles was moving fast, directly towards the one of the young US aides speaking with the Russian President. 

 

"Moira." Erik said urgently, starting to push through the crowd towards where Charles was heading.

 

He caught a glimpse of something metal in the aide's hand and Charles shouted "Raven!" and then all hell breaks loose

 

The US aide reared back to fire what Erik could now see was a small pistol in her hands when she suddenly staggers and reaches a hand to her head. She's quickly tackled by a nearby agent and all Erik can see and hear is screaming and complete chaos as the Russian President's security detail drags him down away from the aide, who ripples through several other skins before settling on bright blue. She fights the men holding her who have stopped to stare, completely taken off guard by her sudden transformation, and uses their distraction to get to her feet, lunging after gun that was on the floor. Erik uses his powers to push the gun skidding across the carpet and Raven curses loudly, twisting her body to avoid the agent's hands.

 

“Raven! Stop!” Charles cries, lifting his hand to his head. Raven immediately doubles over, staggering to the floor. 

 

“Charles?” Her vision clears but Moira's agents take the opportunity to grab her, drag her out of the main floor. Charles follows immediately and Erik makes his way across the floor, still keeping his eye out for anything anomalous. Something did not feel right. Schmidt was one for the long game, the backup plan. This was a little bit too simple. Where was Schmidt? 

 

Frost's voice echoes through his memory, _Sebastian Shaw is already dead, you fool_

 

He shakes his head angrily. “Is the President out?” Moira could be heard asking urgently to the agent next to her as they tried to calm the crowd. 

 

Erik hears the agent reply that the two leaders had been evacuated, but there were still subordinates and high ranking officials in the crowd. He's the only one focusing on the crowd and not Raven. Because of that he's the only one who sees the red tailed mutant appear in a silent puff of smoke, gut the nearest diplomat, and disappear again. 

 

The red man appears again in front of a terrified older woman and draws back his tail once more to strike, but Erik was there to meet him, sending his rounds of ammunition flying through the air towards the other man.

 

He was blindingly fast, dodging or teleporting out of the way of every scrap of metal that Erik was sending at him. He teleports in front of Erik, slashing at him, and he manages to block it with his hand, melted metal covering his palm and protecting him from the seemingly razor sharp tail. Sparks fly and he grabs at the other man only to feel completely disoriented as he suddenly was in a completely different place. The red man was gripping onto him, moving their positions across the room rapidly and Erik fights not to throw up. The man drops Erik and sends his tail through the air to slice across the abdomen of the nearest human in a spray of blood, and they cry out in fear and pain.

 

“Enough.”

 

Erik splits the metal decorations off a nearby pole, adding some reinforcement from the chair backs, and splits them into a thousand sharp needles. He whirls them like a hurricane, focused in the space where the red mutant was and sending them zipping through any open spaces in between guests. The red mutant teleports and reappears...right into the stabbing cloud of knives. As the man fell crying out, Erik grabs the front of the mutants suit and holds out his hand. He combines several of the needles and slams it through the red man's shoulder, pinning him cruelly to the carpet.

 

The devilish man grins at him as if the metal in his shoulder was nothing. 

 

"Too late, little chaser," he grins, before he disappears again, leaving a puddle of blood - and the spike- still embedded on the floor. Erik curses and looks around again fro the mutant

 

"Where's Charles?" Moira asks, having to yell over the general pandemonium of the crowd.

 

"I thought he went off with you and Raven," he replies, confused. 

 

"Frost has broken out of the facility," Moira says grimly. "No sign of forced entry or exit, just disappeared like a ghost."

 

Erik curses again. This was just getting worse and worse.

 

"I know where Charles is," Moira continues in a slightly changed tone. Erik looks up at her in confusion. Didn't they just have this conversation? "He's out here. This door leads to an alleyway that leads to the garage."

 

Moira tugs on his arm, pulling him towards a side door at the end of the room. He follows willingly, keeping an eye out for that red mutant. As soon as he exits the side door however into the outside air, he knows that something is not right. The door slams shut and Charles and Raven look up, her blue face tear-streaked. They had been leaning against the far brick wall, supporting each other. 

 

"Are you both alright?" he asks, a flood of relief flowing through him at the sight of Charles.

 

"Not quite," Moira says calmly, and smoothly pumps two bullets into Charles' gut.

 

The world slows down to a stop. Erik feels the blood rush to his head, and he vaguely feels himself crushing the gun into a crumpled ball, ignoring Moira's sound of pain. He watches as Charles falls with a choked cry, and Raven screams, reaching out to cradle him in her arms. Suddenly he's back in that small room with Schmidt, and he's firing, firing the gun over and over again, and there is nothing Erik can do to stop him. All of his power and he's once again useless to save the people he cared about. He can't seem to move, he's frozen again, much like he froze that time, and his mind is screaming at him to just MOVE, do SOMETHING. 

 

"I must thank you for the gift you've given me, Erik," Emma's cool amused tone rings out behind Erik in the alley they were standing in. Her immaculate white dress is trimmed with silver fur. Diamonds drop off her hair and neck, matching her diamond skin. She was dazzling. Erik wants to murder her. 

 

"What?" he moves quickly, standing protectively over the fallen Charles.

 

"I may keep her, she's remarkably receptive, even for a human," Emma says. "It's tit for tat really, you injure my teleporter, I damage your telepath. Only justice, right Erik?" She draws the word justice out in a mocking tone. 

 

Erik couldn't speak through the rage he was feeling. Couldn't see anything other than the spray of blood and Charles' expression as he fell. 

 

_A spray of blood stained the white snow, and his wrung out body was crumpled like a doll, his contorted face staring out at nothing._

 

Erik shook his head violently. "Stay out of my head!" he screams, trying to throw the rest of his ammo at Emma. They bounce off her in a spray of sparks and suddenly his limbs are frozen, a painful cold starting to spread through them. Erik feels himself sliding to the ground not of his own volition. Frost looks down at him, and he remembers this! He knows this part.

 

"It's quite pitiful really, your entire life. Well in any case, what you've tried to do here has failed. Azazel didn't get the president, but he will. It's a shame we had to reveal ourselves like that, but the humans will blame each other in any case." she shrugs, a tinkling filling the air at the movement.

 

Erik couldn't look away from Charles, gasping for pain on the ground, his hand clutched around his midsection. 

He feels his arm taking a knife from his belt, and he tried to fight it, he put all of himself behind stopping his arm, but only succeeded in slowing him down. He drives the knife downward into the palm of his other hand and screams. The pain was shocking enough to temporarily regain control of his body and he jerked his hand away, the knife still embedded.

 

"Oh, yes, that was for Janos as well. Did you think you could damage my things and not face the consequences?" she said, laughing. 

 

She strides towards him, freezing him again as she kneels next to him, gripping his face with her hands .

 

_Long thin fingers grasped his chin with her hand and turned his head to meet her burning red eyes. It seemed like her gaze pierced his entire life, and he hated it, HATED it but was too weak to struggle._

 

"Get out of my head!" he screams as she turns his face towards her. 

 

"Do you remember now, little chaser?" she says softly, her expression at odds with her soft voice. "Do you remember when you took him from me?"

 

_He had found the strength. He felt the coin bear through the other man's head as if it had been his own. A spray of blood stained the white snow, and his wrung out body was crumpled like a doll, his face contorted horribly. Erik dimly felt someone screaming in the background but he didn't care, Schmidt's death feeling as sweet to him as anything that he had ever felt in his life._

 

_When it was over, he felt wrung out, blank, blissfully empty. He lay there in the snow, completely weak, defenseless. And that was how she found him._

 

Erik feels his limbs start to shake, horror overtaking him. He had...he had already done this. He had killed Schmidt and he hadn't even remembered. How was this possible? How long had this happened? How long had he been searching...searching for a dead man? She had...she had taken his revenge from him. 

 

Emma smiles as she sees that he had begun to understand. "Yes. I took that from you. Just as i thought you had taken my future from me. Shaw was everything to me. He was my mentor, my lover, my friend," her grip turned hard, "You took him from me. There's something ironic about killing a mutant whose power is over metal with a metal knife. I like the symmetry."

 

He can barely hear her voice through the blood rushing through his ears. He had already killed Schmidt. He had been going in circles...all this time. He had gotten Charles killed...for nothing.

 

Frost rips the knife out of his hand and he couldn't even scream. She raises the knife again, this time aimed at his throat. His face was frozen, completely frozen. It had almost seemed like time itself had frozen. What did it matter? He had wasted all of their time for nothing. He would die here, and there was nothing he could do about it.

 

He feels fingers curl around his ankle. He couldn't look down, couldn't move an inch of his body in that grimy alley, but he felt those slick fingers curling around him, touching him slightly. And just like that, the hold on his body is gone. The ice and cold wind blowing through his mind ceases, followed by a vivid image of Emma's midsection, a diamond area right below the center of her breasts. 

 

Quickly, he uses his power to fuse the rest of the ammunition in his pocket into a solid metallic piece. The thing about diamonds, was that they were so easy to shatter, if you knew the right place. 

 

As the knife plunges down, he strikes out as hard as he can with his makeshift hammer, right at the spot that Charles had shown him. It made a sound like a bell tolling, and he _felt_ her crack fundamentally. She opened her mouth to scream, but he was already too far gone to hear it. 

 

The faint hold that Charles had on his mind was shredded like paper underneath the torrent of angerpainhate that descends on him from Emma's mind. It scours everything away, his mind feels as if it is a cracked bowl and everything is melting out. Schmidt...his mother....Magda...Charles. He tries to scream but he's forgotten how. 

 

****  


 

“ _This was all you had wasn't it,” she asked, clearly not expecting an answer. “The chase.”_

 

_He couldn't open his mouth to answer. The world was already fading like a dream, the snow beneath his body starting to feel as warm and soft as any bed._

 

“ _You killed him, I didn't think it was possible. I wouldn't have allowed it otherwise,” her voice felt like the snow, but less welcoming._

 

“ _I'm sure you would kill me as well given half a chance. I should kill you right here where you lie. But I suspect you'll die soon enough. Just a bit of insurance.”_

 

_She took off her glove and grasped his chin with her hands, turning his face to meet her eyes more clearly. The pain of her gaze hit him like a bludgeon, and he screamed, or at least he thinks he screamed. it was the last thing he remembered._


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for your patience!

_Schmidt is a lot stronger than he had expected. He doesn't quite understand how the man he had thought was a mere human, just one given a taller shadow by memory, could easily shrug off beams of metal, bullets, everything Erik threw at him and more; and give it back tenfold. He lay on the ground, panting, frustrated by his own weakness. It doesn't even occur to him that Schmidt is a mutant like him, he just thinks of it as his own weakness._

_  
The other man's face is fierce and joyous, certain in his ability to counter whatever Erik throws at him. He's lost his fancy coat, his clothes are ripped, and yet he still stands unscratched. Erik feels his breath catch in his throat. Is he simply not strong enough?_

 

****

 

He lies on his bed, curled up and face buried in the sheet. He doesn't want to open his eyes. His bed in his room feels comfortable and he doesn't have to think here. He's in his old bedroom as a child, and he doesn't know how he knows this, he just knows. It smells just like it did when he was a boy, like old pine and nostalgia. This was before they were forced to move, before they had to sell everything they had. He cracks his eyes open and he's correct, it looks just as it did back then, except there's now a puzzle on the table instead of his old toys. It seems to be assembling itself, but the middle is warped and damaged. He remembered looking at this puzzle before, with..with who? The puzzle was no longer assembling itself, it was just lying static on the table.

 

"I tried to save as much as possible."

 

The voice startles him, and he jumps and turned around. He didn't realize there was anyone else in the room. Charles stands there, looking very tired. 

 

He's moving forward before he even realizes it, and Charles eyes only manage to widen before he crushes the other man to his chest. He doesn't know why he feels so desperate to see this man, all he knows is that a crushing relief is flowing through him at the sight of him.

 

"Charles," he breathes, sinking his hand into the other man's soft brown hair. 

 

Charles' arms come up around him briefly, an almost painfully sweet squeeze, before he pushes him away gently. "I'm...not quite up to par as I should be right now."

 

And Erik notices that Charles is quite transparent, and fading even faster the closer he gets to the other man.

 

"What is this? What happened?"

 

"I should have suspected that she would go for Moira first, but I thought after our confrontation that I was more than enough to handle her...hubris again," Charles grimaced a bit before bringing his hands up to frame Erik's face in a familiar gesture. "I know what she did now. When you destroyed her, she was spilling everything. I...got the worst of it. She truly didn't know what she was doing when she took your memory. It was messy, and just..." Charles looked sad at this, "Just a young telepath lashing out in desperation."

 

Erik is still confused but he can feel Charles' anxiety and reaches for him again, wanting to soothe him. 

"Shhh," Charles whispers, gripping Erik's face a bit harder. "This...I'm going to help you now. I wish I could say that this wasn't selfish as well," he laughs, a little bitterly, "but my God Erik...I want you to remember me."

 

"I do remember you," Erik responds. And he does. He knows this man, he feels...something that he didn't think he would ever be able to again for him. He just doesn't know why. But for the the first time, he's alright without knowing. Simply being able to be in this spot in time, with this man, was enough for Erik. He felt as if he were forgetting something important, but he didn't want to think too hard about it. That way lay pain. 

 

"Of course you do," Charles smiles. "When this is over...promise me that you won't run."

 

"Of course I promise." Erik says easily. Why would he run? Charles is going to fix him and they'd be able to go home? He shakes his head as a niggling voice in the back of his mind twinges again. He leans down to capture the other man's lips and Charles makes a small desperate sound in the back of his throat before turning his face away. 

 

"Sit down, Erik." Charles loosens his grip, steps back from Erik. 

 

Erik takes a seat on the bed and waits patiently as Charles sits at the table with the puzzle. A sharp iron spike materializes in his hand and he positions it right above the warped part of the puzzle, striking down straight and true. The warped part, and a good chunk of the whole pieces shatter, the puzzle seemingly in pieces. Erik feels his his body twitch violently and he stares at the rapidly turning transparent brown haired man who is currently sitting across from him, carefully molding what seems to be puzzle pieces together? 

 

Erik looks around in some discomfort. How did he get here? Who was this person, and why were they in what seemed to be his childhood bedroom?

 

The young man sitting at the table looks over to him, and his eyes seem to soften. "Go back to sleep, Erik."

 

********

 

He stirs sugar into what these Americans called coffee and leans back against the booth, wincing as the movement pulls slightly on his injuries. He had woken up in a hospital several weeks ago with what had looked like federal agents guarding his door. He had no urge to allow them to apparently recapture him, so he slipped out the window, stole a car and kept moving. He had tried to remember what had happened before, but his memory was very patchy past arriving in Los Angeles. He idly traces the lines of his tattoos underneath his blue button down. He rememberes now, what each one was for. He wasn't sure how, something about a puzzle, but it helped. The memory was coming back in slow, small patches. 

 

He has not found any more evidence of Schmidt recently, and it was making him impatient. And...for what felt like the first time in a long time, he had no real urge to search for the Doctor. It's like as soon as his memory returned to normal, that fire inside him had..not exactly gone out, but been diminished, quite a bit. These past few weeks had felt like he was waiting for the other shoe to drop, but he's not sure what the other shoe even _is._

 

He feels as if he's just been floating in some kind of limbo. Irritated at himself, he leaves his still mostly full coffee on the table and stands to leave. Maybe he would go back over the records he had gathered on the Hellfire club. He got up and started to walk through the aisles to leave when he felt something snag on his shirt. 

 

"Slow down Romeo."

 

He looks down to see a young dark haired woman sitting in the booth holding onto his jacket. She's wearing a demure suit, and her eyes are covered with a pair of dark sunglasses. He stops in his tracks at the name. 

 

"Moira."

 

She smiles. "So you do remember. When you left, we all feared the worst. "

 

"No, not really," he admits, "Some things are familiar to me now, but I'm still not sure where I met you from."

 

"And I'm sure you would've remembered me, right?" Moira smiles again, but it seemed strange, like she had practiced the motion. 

 

"Sit, Erik."

 

Erik slides into the booth across from her. 

 

"He misses you."

 

Erik shrugs rather than betray his ignorance as to whom she's speaking about.

 

"And he has no idea if what he did worked. Have you been remembering things?" she tries again.

 

"I remember...a puzzle. And I have been better, somewhat, " he admits. "I haven't woken up not knowing where I am yet, in any case."

 

"Look," Moira takes off her sunglasses and leans forward on the table. She looks tired and almost haggard, and Erik blinks in surprise and she takes his hand in hers. "This is the least I can do for him after... after everything." 

 

She lets go of his hand and slides a card across the table to him. Erik feels a shock of recognition go through him as he catches a glimpse: 

 

_Charles F. Xavier_

_Professor of Genetics_

_Oxford University_

 

She flips the card around to the back where the words ' _He can help you_ ' had been circled with pen, with an address in New York added on the back. 

 

All those weeks feeling like he was missing something and this...this had to be it. Just the name on the card had evoked more emotion in him than he had felt all week while listlessly looking for Schmidt. 

 

"I'll do you this one more favor, in case you're still on this idiotic fucking quest of yours." Rummaging about in her purse, she pulls out a manila envelope and slides it across the table. 

 

"It's your choice if you want to run in circles for the rest of your life, but you have an out." she said, sliding out of the booth and putting her sunglasses back on.

 

"How did you find me anyway?" Erik asks, curious. 

 

"Are you serious?" she laughs as she leaves. 

 

Erik scowls and looks down at the envelope in the middle of the table. This was obviously something important but sensitive enough that she didn't hand it out to him in the open like the card. He gets up from the table and heads outside, absently hailing a cab down. 

 

He rattles off the address to his current bedsit and sat back in the backseat, spilling the contents of the envelope out into his lap. Three polaroids and what looked like two legal documents slipped out, and he reads the document first, skimming it then freezing at the words at the very top of the paper

 

It was a death certificate for one Klaus Schmidt, aka Sebastian Shaw. He closes his eyes, waiting to feel...something. Anything. All he felt was a sick tiredness. The second document was a CIA internal document stating details of where his body was found, and the fact that he had died from a shot to the head. They dated his moment of death to over a year ago. He picks up the polaroids, and almost drops them again once he gets a good look at their contents. Schmidt's clearly dead face was staring out in the photos, a slit in the middle of his forehead. Erik is suddenly transported to the vicious, ugly thought he had in the weeks after Schmidt had murdered his mother, promises that he wouldn't stop until he had sent that coin straight through the middle of that fucker's forehead. And like that, he knows. He knows he had been the one to kill him. 

 

He stares at the photographs as if frozen. So this is what Moira was trying to tell him? That he had been wasting weeks, no, years of his life on a dead man. A man that he had apparently killed, but didn't remember. All of his work, his struggle, and not only was the memory of his revenge stolen from him, he didn't even get to remember that he had done it in the first place.

 

He feels the rage that he had been missing so shortly before bubble up in him. The door handle he had been holding onto had five perfect imprints pressed deeply into the metal. 

 

Emma Frost.

 

He didn't regret a moment of shattering her.

 

He blinks. Shattering her...the thought brings forth a memory of her falling to pieces, oddly beautiful despite the violence of the moment. He remembers that more clearly than he does killing Schmidt.

 

_Killing Schmidt won't bring you peace._

 

He hears the voice in his head as clear as day, and digs the card back out of his pocket. For the first time in a long time, he feels completely lost. What was he going to do now? Could he believe Moira? He had always thought that he would never survive the fight with Schmidt...and now he's in a world where his family had been avenged, his family was still dead, and he was...purposeless. What the hell was he doing? Life had been way simpler when he had a simple purpose. Now that his revenge was over, he had nothing left. 

 

He looks down to see that he had crushed the polaroid in his hand in a panic. He almost wishes he could throw the polaroids out the window and then never experience this moment again. And like that, an insidious thought occurred to him. Had he...done this before? Had he been chasing Schmidt in circles? The letter dated Schmidt's death to almost a year ago. No...no, he was sure he wouldn't have. He would have remembered that. 

 

Emma Frost had known. He suddenly remembers the sound of her laugher at him in the Hellfire club, as if she were right there in the cab with him. Right after Charles F. Xavier was shot. Charles...

 

Charles!

 

***

 

His hand hovers above the doorknob of the ridiculously intimidating house. Now that he was here, he wasn't quite sure why he had practically flown here after he had remembered that Charles had been shot. Surely a man who could afford this house could afford the best medical care that money could buy. Surely this man would not want to see someone who had...effectively gotten him shot for nothing. Suddenly this idea seemed more foolish than anything else and Erik takes one step back, ready to just leave, before the door slams open and Raven is standing there, blue and glorious.

 

"Erik!" she yells in surprise, startling him. He doesn't get to say a word before she clamps down on his arm and drags him into the house, starting towards the grand staircase in the back. "Thank god, are you alright? When you disappeared from the hospital we all thought...we thought you had decided to leave, or that what Charles had tried didn't work, or-," she stops mid-step and whirls to face him, her yellow eyes boring in to his. "Do you remember me? Are you all fixed? Charles said that there was a chance that you would lose all of it," she continues doubtfully. 

 

"I..know you at least." And he does. Once he saw her face at the door, he knew her name was Raven, and that she was Charles' sister. With that thought came a warm feeling of admiration, wariness...everything he felt when he had seen her for the first time in Russia. With her and Moira, it felt like he was looking at a coloring book, his memory of them were bare outlines, and once he saw their faces, the feelings that he had about them just came back, flooding his mind.

 

"Where is Charles? Is he okay?" he asks urgently. 

 

"Charles is...better." 

 

Erik almost panics at this evasive answer, but she grabs his arm again and pulls him towards the staircase. 

 

"He already knows you're here. He can't come downstairs yet, but he's dying to see you."

 

Erik follows, but he is suddenly terrified. What if Charles blames him for what happened? How can he face the man when he had effectively led him into a situation where he could have been injured due to his own stupidity and sheer stubbornness? 

 

All of his panic melts away however, as soon as he steps into the doorway. Raven closes the door behind them and he doesn't even notice.

 

Charles is sitting up in the middle of the bed near the window. His brown hair was sleep mussed and Erik had seen those eyes in his sleep every night since he left the hospital. He's dressed in a pair of pajamas despite the hour, and he looked slightly thinner, more weary. Erik feels...everything at once, a riotous confusion of emotion in his chest as he looks at the other man. 

 

How could he have ever forgotten him?

 

"I thought you said you weren't going to leave?" Charles says, his smile softening the words a bit.

 

"I'm sorry...I forgot." he replies, drawing closer to the bed, barely paying attention to what he was saying.

 

"How did you find this place?"

 

Erik pulls the card out of his back jeans pocket, and lies it face down on the bed in between them, unable to take his eyes away from the other man's hands as he picks it up. 

 

"Moira," Charles says, a sad look on his face. "She wouldn't stay you know? I tried to tell her that it was fine, that anyone would've done what she had done. She didn't have any defenses against Frost. But it was like talking to a blank wall." He smiled, putting the card back down into Erik's hand. "Stubborn as ever, like some people I know."

 

"I remember." Erik blurts, before shaking his head and trying again."I remember destroying Frost...what happened to you. Are you alright?"

 

A strange look passes over Charles face before he recovers, pulling the blanket up around his lower half. "Not as well as I would've hoped, but healing slowly. And you? I was terrified that I had destroyed your memory with that trick. I would never have figured it out if it wasn't for Emma, in the end." He looks a bit sad at that, but Erik has no idea why he would be sad at that psychopath's death. Killing Emma was the best decision he had made since his resolve to kill Schmidt. 

 

"Moira told me," he starts, putting his hand over the polaroids that he had shoved into his front pocket. "Did you know he was dead?"

 

"Only at the end. I couldn't be sure before, although Emma seemed to be telling the truth." Charles says, a bit anxiously. "I wasn't trying to keep it from you, but it's hard to tell who is speaking the lie when both parties think wholeheartedly that they know the truth. Perils of being a telepath."

 

Erik shakes his head, he didn't blame Charles for that. He wasn't sure he would have listened in any case, even if Charles had told him then.

 

"And now?" Charles asks, gripping the edges of his blanket. "Are you going to leave again?"

 

Erik thinks about Schmidt, and how the revenge he had apparently gotten before didn't make a damn difference to anyone now. He thinks about the long empty stretch of days in front of him. He thinks about a barely remembered moonlight conversations, and mostly of how hopeful Charles looks at this moment, and how much he wants to be with this man, this man that he barely knows, even now. After years of thinking that he had lost it forever, stepping into this room with this man was the closest Erik has ever felt of home since the camps. He doesn't know if this would work, or if he will even keep on remembering things like he was doing now. But he doesn't care. No more long reaching plans for now. He wants to take it a day at a time, now that he has the luxury of that choice. No polaroids involved. 

 

"I think I'll stay for a bit," He sits on the edge of the bed, placing his hand over the telepath's. "If there's space for me in this mansion," he jokes lightly. 

 

Charles stares at their joined hands and throws his covers over, wrapping his arms around Erik tightly. "God, Erik...I thought I broke your memories forever, I thought...I thought I was wrong." he whispers, relief that had been hidden before now bubbling over his words. 

 

Erik hugs back just as tightly. He says nothing, but he thinks that even if what Charles had done had damaged his memory, he still would have found some way back to this man. Schmidt and Frost had already stolen his past. Charles had given him back his future. A remembered conversation drifted to him and he smiles, his lips curving into the other man's neck.

 

"So, do you have a need for any teachers?"

 

Charles smile is as radiant as the sun. 

 

  


 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'd like to thank my artist for the idea and her patience! (and her awesome art!). I've been rather inspired to make a series out of this, so look forward to more of Charles and Erik!


End file.
